Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-x24gv Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-06-03T00:52:21.830Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

THE COSMOPOLITAN HISTORIOGRAPHY OF TWENTIETH-CENTURY FEDERALISM

Part of: Historiographical Reviews

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 July 2020

MERVE FEJZULA Open the ORCID record for MERVE FEJZULA [Opens in a new window]
MERVE FEJZULA*
Affiliation:
University of Missouri
*
214 Read Hall, University of Missouri, Columbia, Missouri, 65211fejzulam@missouri.edu
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This article examines the historiographical debate over federalism between the 1930s and 1960s. In their most sweeping iterations, revisionists have sought to unravel the history of the nation-state, by using the history of anti-colonial federalist demands for equal incorporation into imperial states as evidence against a teleology of nationalist independence. In perceiving the democratic potentialities embedded within imperial state forms, revisionists argue that anti-colonial federalists therefore belong within a cosmopolitan tradition of seeking democratic supra-national governance beyond empire and nation. Some iterations of ‘post-colonial cosmopolitanism’ have unfortunately channelled debate into an opposition between federalism and nationalism, while also generating methodological republicanism, the tendency to view proto-republics within imperial formations. This review challenges these interpretive shortcomings and argues instead that federalism ought to be understood as part of a contest about the state as such. By integrating scholarship on French and British imperial federalism with recent work on regional federalisms in European and African contexts, this essay centres a whole range of ideological variations of ‘cosmopolitanism’ that adapted federalism to their critiques of the state. Ultimately, this reframing of federalist historiography enables new insights into contests about, and not just over, twentieth-century states.

Type
Historiographical Review
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 64 , Issue 2 , March 2021 , pp. 477 - 500
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press.

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

With enormous thanks to the village that raised this article: Tom Arnold-Forster, Freddy Foks, Lisa Gilson, Sam Klug, Julienne Obadia, Hana Sleiman, Rosanna Webster, Christopher Wilson, Musab Younis, attendees of the Women's Intellectual History Luncheon Seminar, the anonymous reviewers, and the reviews editor Andrew Arsan.

References

1 Cooper, Frederick, ‘Possibility and constraint: African independence in historical perspective’, Journal of African History, 49 (2008), pp. 167–96CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Collins, Michael, ‘Decolonisation and the “federal moment”’, Diplomacy & Statecraft, 24 (2013), pp. 21–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Burbank, Jane and Cooper, Frederick, Empires in world history: power and the politics of difference (Princeton, NJ, 2011), p. 10Google Scholar.

4 Michael Goebel, ‘After empire must come nation?’, Afro-Asian Visions (8 Sept. 2016), at https://medium.com/afro-asian-visions/after-empire-must-come-nation-cd220f1977c.

5 Samuel Moyn, ‘Fantasies of federalism’, Dissent, 62 (2015), at www.dissentmagazine.org/article/fantasies-of-federalism. See also Goebel, ‘After empire’; Drayton, Richard, ‘Federal utopias and the realities of imperial power’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 37 (2017), pp. 401–6CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Younis, Musab, ‘Against independence’, London Review of Books, 39 (29 June 2017)Google Scholar.

6 Mantena, Karuna, ‘On Gandhi's critique of the state: sources, contexts, conjectures’, Modem Intellectual History, 9 (2012), pp. 535–63, at p. 539CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Goswami, Manu, ‘Imaginary futures and colonial internationalisms’, American Historical Review, 117 (2012), pp. 1461–85CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Krug, Jessica, Fugitive modernities: Kisama and the politics of freedom (London, 2018)Google Scholar; Scott, James C., The art of not being governed: an anarchist history of upland Southeast Asia (New Haven, CT, 2009)Google ScholarPubMed.

7 Getachew, Adom, Worldmaking after empire: the rise and fall of self-determination (Princeton, NJ, 2019)Google Scholar. Getachew uses this specific term, but it also crops up as Gary Wilder's ‘concrete cosmopolitanism’, in Sukanya Banerjee's ‘discrepant cosmopolitanism’, among others. Wilder, Gary, Freedom time: negritude, decolonization, and the future of the world (London, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Banerjee, Sukanya, Becoming imperial citizens: Indians in the late Victorian empire (London, 2010)Google Scholar.

8 See Brock, Gillian and Brighouse, Harry, eds., The political philosophy of cosmopolitanism (Cambridge, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 See Burbank and Cooper, Empires.

10 See Archibugi, Daniele, The global commonwealth of citizens: toward cosmopolitan democracy (Princeton, NJ, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Benhabib, Seyla, ‘Twilight of sovereignty or the emergence of cosmopolitan norms? Rethinking citizenship in volatile times’, Citizenship Studies, 11 (2007), pp. 19–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Habermas, Jürgen, The postnational constellation (Cambridge, 2001)Google Scholar; Appiah, Kwame Anthony, Cosmopolitanism: ethics in a world of strangers (New York, NY, 2007)Google Scholar.

11 Hunter, Emma, ‘Languages of freedom in decolonising Africa’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 27 (2017), pp. 253–69CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 For an overview, see Wright, Julian and Jones, H. S., eds., Pluralism and the idea of the republic in France (Basingstoke, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13 See Dimier, Véronique, ‘For a republic “diverse and indivisible”? France's experience from the colonial past’, Contemporary European History, 13 (2004), pp. 45–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Dimier, Véronique, ‘Unity in diversity: contending conceptions of the French nation and republic’, West European Politics, 27 (2004), pp. 836–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Emily Marker, ‘France between Europe and Africa: youth, race, and envisioning the postwar world, 1940–1960’ (Ph.D. thesis, University of Chicago, 2016); Céline Pauthier, ‘L'Indépendance ambiguë: construction nationale, anticolonialisme et pluralisme culturel en Guinée (1945–2010)’ (Ph.D. thesis, Université Paris 7 Diderot, 2014).

14 Dimier, ‘For a republic “diverse and indivisible”?’, p. 48.

15 Frederick Cooper, ‘Federation, confederation, territorial state: debating a postimperial future in French West Africa, 1945–1960’, in Arato, Andrew, Cohen, Jean L., and von Busekist, Astrid, eds., Forms of pluralism and democratic constitutionalism (New York, NY, 2018), pp. 33–51Google Scholar. See also Gary Wilder, ‘Decolonization and postnational democracy’, in Arato, Cohen, and von Busekist, eds., Forms of pluralism, pp. 52–71.

16 Burbank and Cooper, Empires, p. 2. See also Benton, Lauren and Ross, Richard J., eds., Legal pluralism and empires, 1500–1850 (New York, NY, 2013)Google Scholar; Barkey, Karen, Empire of difference: the Ottomans in comparative perspective (Cambridge, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17 Cooper, Frederick, Colonialism in question: theory, knowledge, history (Berkeley, CA, 2005), pp. 153–230CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18 Cooper, Frederick, Citizenship between empire and nation (Princeton, NJ, 2015) p. 9Google Scholar.

19 Wilder, Freedom time, p. 7; Nesbitt, Nick, ‘Departmentalization and the logic of decolonization’, L'Esprit Créateur, 47 (2007), pp. 32–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

20 Wilder, Gary, The French imperial nation-state: negritude and colonial humanism between the two world wars (Chicago, IL, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

21 Thomas, Martin, ‘The colonial policies of the mouvement républicain populaire, 1944–1954: from reform to reaction’, English Historical Review, 118 (2003), pp. 380–411CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

22 Dimier, ‘For a republic “diverse and indivisible”?’; Shipway, Martin, ‘Thinking like an empire: governor Henri Laurentie and postwar plans for the late colonial French “empire-state”’, in Thomas, Martin, ed., The French colonial mind: mental maps of empire and colonial encounters, i (Lincoln, NE, 2011), pp. 219–50Google Scholar.

23 Dimier, ‘For a republic “diverse and indivisible”?’, p. 63.

24 Cooper, Citizenship, pp. 35–6.

25 Gratien, J. P., Marius Moutet: un socialiste à l'outre-mer (Paris, 2006)Google Scholar.

26 Cited in Cooper, Citizenship, p. 40.

27 Rahal, Malika, Ali Boumendjel, 1919–1957: une affaire française, une histoire algérienne (Paris, 2010)Google Scholar.

28 Rahal, Malika, ‘La place des réformistes dans le mouvement national algérien’, Vingtième Siècle, 3 (2004), pp. 161–71, at p. 165CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

29 Goebel, ‘After empire’.

30 Goebel, Michael, Anti-imperial metropolis: interwar Paris and the seeds of third world nationalism (New York, NY, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

31 Lawrence, Adria, Imperial rule and the politics of nationalism: anti-colonial protest in the French empire (Cambridge, 2013), p. 92CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

32 Schmidt, Elizabeth, Mobilizing the masses: gender, ethnicity, and class in the nationalist movement in Guinea, 1939–1958 (Portsmouth, 2005)Google Scholar. See also Tom Westland, ‘How unequal was the federation of French West Africa’, Decompressing History (28 Feb. 2018), https://decompressinghistory.com/2018/02/18/how-unequal-was-the-federation-of-french-west-africa/.

33 Cooper, Colonialism, p. 154.

34 Banerjee, Becoming, p. 11.

35 Martin, Ged, ‘The “idea of imperial federation”’, in Hyam, Ronald and Martin, Ged, eds., Reappraisals in British imperial history (London, 1975), pp. 121–38Google Scholar.

36 Bell, Duncan, The idea of greater Britain: empire and the future of world order, 1860–1900 (Princeton, NJ, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

37 Darwin, John, ‘What was the late colonial state?’, Itinerario, 23 (1999), pp. 73–82, at p. 78CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

38 For differing accounts of the relationship between pluralism and federalism, see Mantena, ‘On Gandhi's critique’, p. 540; Bell, The idea, p. 267.

39 Gorman, Daniel, Imperial citizenship: empire and the question of political belonging (Manchester, 2006)Google Scholar; Bell, The idea; Banerjee, Becoming.

40 Gorman, Imperial citizenship, p. 24.

41 Burton, Antoinette, ‘Who needs the nation? Interrogating “British” history’, Journal of Historical Sociology, 10 (2002), pp. 227–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

42 Rush, Anne Spry, Bonds of empire: West Indians and Britishness from Victoria to decolonization (Oxford, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Matera, Marc, Black London: the imperial metropolis and decolonization in the twentieth century (Oakland, CA, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Perry, Kennetta Hammond, London is the place for me: black Britons, citizenship, and the politics of race (New York, NY, 2015)Google Scholar.

43 Matera, Black London, p. 5.

44 Mantena, Karuna, ‘Popular sovereignty and anti-colonialism’, in Bourke, Richard and Skinner, Quentin, eds., Popular sovereignty in historical perspective (Cambridge, 2016), pp. 297–319CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Datla, Kavita Saraswathi, ‘Sovereignty and the end of empire: the transition to independence in colonial Hyderabad’, Ab Imperio, 3 (2018), pp. 63–88CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mantena, Rama, ‘Anticolonialism and federation in colonial India’, Ab Imperio, 3 (2018), pp. 36–62CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

45 Sir Akbar Hydari, quoted in Datla, ‘Sovereignty’, p. 68.

46 Ibid., p. 67.

47 Dasgupta, Sandipto, ‘“A language which is foreign to us”: continuities and anxieties in the making of the Indian constitution’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 34 (2014), pp. 228–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

48 Sinha, Mrinalini, ‘The strange death of an imperial ideal: the case of Civis Britannicus’, in Dube, Saurabh, ed., Handbook of modernity in South Asia: modern makeovers (New Delhi, 2012), pp. 29–42Google Scholar.

49 Mantena, ‘On Gandhi's critique’, p. 537.

50 Collins, ‘Decolonisation’; and White, Luise, Unpopular sovereignty: Rhodesian independence and the African struggle for decolonization (Chicago, IL, 2015), pp. 37–104CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

51 On the CAF's diplomatic and economic history, see Cohen, Andrew, The politics and economics of decolonisation in Africa: the failed experiment of the Central African Federation (London, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

52 Collins, ‘Decolonisation’, p. 22.

53 Ibid., p. 26.

54 White, Unpopular sovereignty, p. 47.

55 Ibid., pp. 152–3.

56 Lonsdale, John, ‘Ornamental constitutionalism in Africa: Kenyatta and the two queens’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 34 (2006), pp. 87–103CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

57 Ismay Milford, ‘Federation, partnership, and the chronologies of space in 1950s East and Central Africa’, Historical Journal, forthcoming, doi:10.1017/S0018246X19000712.

58 Hopkins, A. G., ‘Rethinking decolonization’, Past & Present, 200 (2008), pp. 211–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

59 Stockwell, A. J., ‘Malaysia: the making of a neo-colony?’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 26 (1998), pp. 138–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar; ‘From Aden to Abu Dhabi: Britain and state formation in Arabia 1962–1971, a retrospective’, Middle Eastern Studies, 53, Special Issue (2017).

60 Banerjee, Becoming, p. 195.

61 Markell, Patchen, ‘The insufficiency of non-domination’, Political Theory, 36 (2006), pp. 9–36, at p. 33CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

62 Streit, Clarence, Union Now (London, 1939)Google Scholar.

63 Baratta, Joseph, The politics of world federation (2 vols., London, 2004)Google Scholar.

64 Rosenboim, Or, The emergence of globalism: visions of world order in Britain and the United States (Princeton, NJ, 2017)Google Scholar.

65 Ibid., p. 10.

66 Ibid., pp. 130–65.

67 Ibid.

68 Ibid., p. 188.

69 Slobodian, Quinn, Globalists: the end of empire and the birth of neoliberalism (Cambridge, 2018)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

70 Ibid., pp. 7–13.

71 Ibid., p. 2.

72 See Strachey, John, Federalism or socialism? (London, 1940)Google Scholar.

73 Getachew, Worldmaking, pp. 107–41.

74 Ibid., p. 135.

75 Allman, Jean, The quills of the porcupine: Asante nationalism in an emergent Ghana (Madison, WI, 1993), p. 78Google Scholar.

76 Vaughan, Chris, ‘The politics of regionalism and federation in East Africa, 1958–1964’, Historical Journal, 62 (2019), pp. 519–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

77 Cooper, Citizenship; Cissoko, Sékéné Mody, Un combat pour l'unité de l'Afrique de l'ouest: la fédération du Mali (1959–1960) (Dakar, 2005)Google Scholar.

78 Manga, Mohamed Lamine, La Casamance dans l'histoire contemporaine du Sénégal (Paris, 2012)Google Scholar; Dalberto, Séverine Awenengo, ‘Hidden debates over the status of the Casamance during the decolonization process in Senegal: regionalism, territorialism, and federalism at a crossroads, 1946–1962’, Journal of African History, 61 (2020), pp. 67–88CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

79 Willis, Justin, Lynch, Gabrielle, and Cheeseman, Nic, ‘Voting, nationhood, and citizenship in late colonial Africa’, Historical Journal, 61 (2018), pp. 1113–35, at pp. 1118, 1130CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

80 Giblin, James, ‘Creating continuity: liberal governance and dissidence in Njombe, Tanzania, 1960–1961’, International Journal of African Historical Studies, 40 (2007), pp. 27–50, at p. 29Google Scholar.

81 Krug, Fugitive modernities, p. 175.

82 Wilder, Freedom time, p. 243.

83 Pettit, Philip, Republicanism: a theory of freedom and government (Oxford, 1997)Google Scholar.

84 Merve Fejzula, ‘The impossibility of black sovereignty’, Black Perspectives (29 Nov. 2019), www.aaihs.org/the-impossibility-of-black-sovereignty/.

85 This expands upon one of the core arguments of his earlier book, The French imperial nation-state.

86 Wilder, Freedom time, p. 10.

87 Ibid., pp. 199, 7.

88 Ibid., p. 5.

89 Emphasis his. Ibid., p. 144.

90 Moyn, Samuel, ‘On the nonglobalization of ideas’, in Sartori, Andrew and Moyn, Samuel, eds., Global intellectual history (New York, NY, 2013), pp. 187–204CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

91 Krug, Fugitive modernities, p. 21.

92 Scott, Joan, Only paradoxes to offer: French feminists and the rights of man (Cambridge, 1997)Google Scholar.

93 Getachew, Worldmaking, p. 30.

94 Ibid., pp. 18–23.

95 Rodgers, Daniel, ‘Republicanism: the career of a concept’, Journal of American History, 79 (1992), pp. 11–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar.