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What’s Worth Reading, August 2022 Adom Getachew, Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination, Princeton University Press, 2019. ‘Drawing on the conceptual and political innovations of anticolonial worldmaking, a postcolonial cosmopolitanism entails a critical diagnosis of the persistence of empire and a normative orientation that retains the anti-imperial aspiration for a domination-free international order’ (10). Worldmaking after Empire opens by evoking the declaration of independence in Ghana and the aspirations surrounding it: 'At midnight on March 6, 1957, Kwame Nkrumah took to the stage in Accra to announce the independence of the Gold Coast, renamed Ghana in homage to the ancient West African empire. In his speech, Nkrumah declared that 1957 marked the birth of a new Africa “ready to fight its own battles and show that after all the black man is capable of managing his own affairs.” In his view, the decade-long struggle for Ghanaian independence was only one battle in the broader struggle for African emancipation. “Our independence,” Nkrumah famously maintained, “is meaningless unless it is linked up with the total liberation of the African continent.” This connection between Ghana’s independence and African emancipation not only looked forward to the formation of new African states but also envisioned national independence as the first step in constituting a Pan-African federation and transforming the international order' (1). Getachew suggests that 'it is easy to miss the revolutionary implications and global reverberations of that March night in 1957': 'for those gathered in Accra that night, including Martin Luther King Jr, Coretta Scott King, A. Philip Randolph, Ralph Bunche, and Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, Ghanaian independence 'constituted the beginnings of a struggle for racial equality across the world'. So she will resurrect 'the global projects of decolonization black Anglophone anticolonial critics and nationalists spearheaded in the three decades after the end of the Second World War', arguing that 'decolonization was a project of reordering the world that sought to create a domination-free and egalitarian international order' (2): 'Against the standard view of decolonization as a moment of nation-building in which the anticolonial demand for self-determination culminated in the rejection of alien rule and the formation of nation-states, I recast anticolonial nationalism as worldmaking. The central actors of this study reinvented self-determination reaching beyond its association with the nation to insist that the achievement of this ideal required juridical, political, and economic institutions in the international realm that would secure nondomination. Central to this claim was an expansive account of empire that situated alien rule within international structures of unequal integration and racial hierarchy. On this view, empire was a form of domination that exceeded the bilateral relations of colonizer and colonized. As a result, it required a similarly global anticolonial counterpoint that would undo the hierarchies that facilitated domination' (2, emphasis original). 'To understand [the] history of anticolonial worldmaking,' Getachew proposes, 'we need to

grasp the worlds of Pan-Africanism that the central characters of this study inhabited' (5). She names seven 'Anglophone Black Atlantic intellectuals', Nnamdi Azikiwe, W.E.B. Du Bois, Michael Manley, Kwame Nkrumah, Julius Nyerere, George Padmore, and Eric Williams, as those 'central characters', and she closes the book by identifying these anticolonial worldmakers, despite their failure to achieve the kind of self-determination to which they aspired, as significant forerunners of contemporary struggles around race and the legacy of empire: 'the fall of self-determination marks not only a dead end but also a staging ground for reimaging that future. In the Black Atlantic world, from which the worldmakers of this book emerged, intimations of a new language are afoot in the Movement for Black Lives, the Caribbean demand for reparations for slavery and genocide, and South African calls for a social and economic decolonization. Like the worldmakers of decolonization, these political formations have returned to the task of rethinking our imperial past and present in the service of imagining an anti-imperial future' (181). In between these framing statements, Chapter One offers a 'political theory of decolonization', Chapter Two details the preservation of racial hierarchy in the League of Nations in the 'counterrevolutionary moment' after the First World War, and three chapter-length case studies lead up to the brief epilogue. In these case studies Getachew will argue that 'the effort to achieve national independence propelled a rethinking of state sovereignty, inspired a far- reaching reconstitution of the postwar international order, and grounded the twentieth century’s most ambitious vision of global redistribution'. 'In casting anticolonial nationalists as worldmakers rather than solely nation builders,' she continues, 'I illustrate that the age of decolonization anticipated and reconfigured our contemporary questions about international political and economic justice' (3). At first sight, this seems straightforward enough. Getachew will assert Black Atlantic agency in the making of the contemporary world, by resurrecting and reinterpreting initiatives that have either been forgotten, or dismissed as failures. But what she presents as an account of worldmaking turns out to be more an exercise in mythmaking, and its effect, whatever the intention, is to suppress the genuinely revolutionary content of Black Atlantic agency, incorporating, neutralising and finally obliterating it in a narrative shaped not by the critique of race and empire that is at first suggested, but by a liberal 'postcolonial cosmopolitan' perspective that owes nothing to the Anglophone Black Atlantic anticolonial nationalists identified, but is derived exclusively from eminently 'Western' academic political theory. My interest (it is a fascinating text) is in showing how this comes about. Alarm bells sound when Getachew announces at the start that the 'global projects of decolonization black Anglophone anticolonial critics and nationalists spearheaded in the three decades after the end of the Second World War' are 'the institutionalization of a right to self- determination at the United Nations, the formation of regional federations [in West Africa and the Caribbean respectively], and the demand for a New International Economic Order' (2). In fact, only the second of these featured black Anglophone anticolonial leadership, and then for the simple reason that in one case the scheme was confined to the British West Indies, and in the other, initially, to Ghana and Guinea. Each was short-lived, and neither propelled a rethinking of state sovereignty or inspired a far-reaching reconstitution of the postwar international order. On the first, Getachew later reports that: 'When Williams entered national

and regional politics in 1955, West Indian politicians and colonial officials were already in the process of working out the details of the West Indian Federation' (125, emphasis mine). Williams proved unable to win support for his (hardly revolutionary) preference for 'immediate implementation of free trade, freedom of movement, a customs union, and a common external tariff' (126), Manley could not persuade his fellow Jamaican citizens to endorse the federation at the polls, and it never got off the ground. In West Africa, Nkrumah could not convince other fellow leaders that local federation should be a step towards an eventual Union of African States (125-40). So, the 'model of regional federation gave way to forms of functional integration that bolstered the nation-state as critics rejected Nkrumah’s and Williams’s proposals for centralized federal states' (12). There was precious little here that was 'worldmaking', and come to that, precious little that reflected a specifically 'Black Atlantic' perspective. Of the other two cases, Getachew herself says that: 'Broader political formations such as the Bandung Conference and the Non-aligned Movement ... played a central role in securing a right to self-determination and envisioning a New International Economic Order' (5, emphasis mine). As she adds later, debates over self-determination as a right at the UN began in 1950, and were resolved in 1956, and 'enhanced' with the passage of Resolution 1514 in 1960 (89-90); the call for the NIEO (initiated by Algeria's Houari Boumédiène), was largely influenced by Latin American critics of the working of international primary commodity markets. Beyond dispute, Black Atlantic anticolonial nationalists did not spearhead these movements. Having registered this, Getachew continues as follows: 'But if anticolonial worldmaking captures in this sense a broader set of political solidarities, it took a distinctive trajectory in the Black Atlantic, where imagining a world after empire drew on an anticolonial critique that began from the foundational role of New World slavery in the making of the modern world and traced the ways its legacies were constitutive of racial hierarchy in the international order' (5, emphasis mine). This awkward juxtaposition grants that Black Atlantic anticolonial nationalists did not play a central role in relation to either self-determination or the NIEO, but suggests at the same time that their focus on slavery and racial hierarchy was somehow involved - even though there was, again, precious little in their specific content that related directly to slavery or racial hierarchy. So, in the case study chapters themselves, Getachew either juxtaposes sections on Black Atlantic agency in other contexts with material on self-determination and the NIEO respectively, or relies upon the flimsiest of associations to give the impression of a connection. In the first case, with regard to the right to self-determination and the passage of UN Resolution 1514: 'Declaring the dawn of a new era, Nkrumah argued [in September 1960] that the UN should lead the fight against imperialism by protecting all peoples’ right to self-determination and by excluding obstinate imperial powers from membership in the international body. As if in confirmation of Nkrumah’s vision of the UN, the assembly passed the historic resolution 1514, Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples, three months later. ... The resolution marked an important victory for the Pan-Africanism outlined [at the Fifth Pan-African Congress in Manchester] in 1945' (73, emphasis mine). This overlooks the fact that 'obstinate imperial powers' were not excluded, and forgets that Pan- Africanism was interpreted by Nkrumah as requiring an Africa-wide federation of states. In

similar fashion, Getachew later adds that: 'In its central preoccupation with New World slavery and its legacies, Pan-Africanism reinvented and remade inherited ideals and principles. In the context of twentieth-century decolonization, self-determination was the target of this kind of reinvention (77, emphasis mine). No closer connection between New World slavery or Pan- Africanism and self-determination as a right in general or Resolution 1514 in particular is made. Moreover, Getachew immediately notes that the right to self-determination 'appeared unable to fully respond to the expansive critique of empire as enslavement' (78), and goes on to say: 'Anticolonial nationalists indicated their aspirations to political innovation and the refounding of international society by describing their 1960 resolution as a “Declaration on the Granting of Independence.” Following David Armitage’s work on declaration as genre and Ayten Gündoğdu’s account of rights declarations as acts of political founding, the declaration can be read as an effort to break with a world order that was built on racial hierarchy and facilitated empire as enslavement' (79, emphasis mine). A long section on 'empire as enslavement' follows (79-87), after which the analysis of the right of self-determination is resumed. And again the connection is tenuous, and the contrast specious: 'The right to self-determination was a highly contested claim - one that great power states first rejected and later acquiesced to in the face of a growing majority of postcolonial states within the General Assembly. The emergence of a right to self-determination was thus less an inevitable development of postwar institutions and ideals and more an effort to break with the racial hierarchy and colonial slavery that continued to structure the international sphere' (87, emphasis mine). Getachew presents no evidence that any Black Atlantic representative or anyone else made this connection during the debates, and provides no evidence for the claim that colonialism was 'conceived [in Resolution 1514] as a form of slavery in which the colonized were rightless subjects' (90, emphasis mine), or that Anglophone Black Atlantic anticolonial nationalists spearheaded the initiative. The NIEO is presented in a similar fashion. Getachew first connects its emergence to the failure of federation ('With the partial exit federation afforded no longer possible, anticolonial nationalists returned to the international stage with a new project of securing nondomination', 144, emphasis mine), for all the world as if the progenitors of each were one and the same. And from here on, she alternates between discussion of the NIEO on the one hand and the 'new political economy of self-determination ... that located 'economic inequality in an international and imperial division of labor' embraced by Manley and Nyerere on the other, making an association by juxtaposition that only serves to betray the fact that neither 'spearheaded' the NIEO: 'On this view, the global economy of the twentieth century was a product of centuries of imperial domination that integrated the world on hierarchical and unequal terms. With this vision of the global economy in mind, anticolonial nationalists represented the postcolonial world as workers of the world, fashioned Third World solidarity as a form of international class politics, and demanded redistribution on the basis that postcolonial states had in fact produced the wealth the West enjoyed. Against this account of a historically produced dependence, and by analogizing international inequality to domestic class politics, proponents of the NIEO recast

the meaning of sovereign equality' (145, emphasis mine). Having earlier accepted the central role of Bandung and the Non-Aligned Movement in envisioning the NIEO, Getachew cannot identify Manley and Nyerere as 'proponents', nor does she assert that its actual proponents drew directly on their 'new political economy of self- determination'. The upshot is that a chapter introduced as analysing the ways that anticolonial nationalists who drew on the account of the global economy produced by Manley and Nyerere 'responded to an intensified postcolonial predicament with their most ambitious project of worldmaking—the New International Economic Order (NIEO)' (12) does nothing of the sort. Instead, it falls into a fatal contradiction, maintaining on the one hand that this was the 'most ambitious project of [anticolonial] worldmaking', and on the other that its prescriptions were ultimately 'articulated within the terms of a liberal political economy' (145) and Gunnar Myrdal's notion of a 'welfare world'. A discussion of Lewis ('ambivalent about the demands included under the New International Economic Order', 148) and Nkrumah ('skeptical about a welfare world', 149) is then followed by an account of the 'new political economy of self-determination' (151-60). There is only passing reference to the NIEO, but 'proponents of the NIEO' (158) somehow becomes 'Manley, Nyerere, and other proponents of the NIEO' a page later. The following section, 'Making a Welfare World', makes any association looser still: 'Although neither Manley nor Nyerere cited Gunnar Myrdal in their arguments for an egalitarian global economy, his idea of a welfare world captures their vision. ... Invoking a domestic analogy similar to Nyerere’s, Myrdal argued that from the perspective of the developing world the rise of economic nationalism in the West was experienced as “a protective ‘rich men’s club” that further deepened the inequalities generated by imperial domination. ... Ignored by the United States, postcolonial states would take up the struggle for a welfare world in the United Nations. Two years after the publication of Myrdal’s Beyond the Welfare State, postcolonial states passed a resolution in the General Assembly to constitute the United Nations Conference of Trade and Development (UNCTAD), which was founded in 1964. ... [And] while Myrdal himself did not link the NIEO to his internationalization of welfare, both critics and sympathizers took up this perspective. ... While the NIEO gestured toward the inevitable world unity and federation announced at the 1945 Pan-African Congress, its proponents did not take on the task of envisioning a statist or federal institutional structure for this future' (160-68, emphasis mine). All of this in turn leads up to a concluding summary which does away with the idea either that this was 'the twentieth century’s most ambitious vision of global redistribution' (3), or that black Anglophone anticolonial critics and nationalists were leading figures behind it: 'In describing the NIEO as a welfare world, I aim to capture both the scale of the project and the ways it departed from the black Marxist roots of anticolonial worldmaking. It will be clear to readers that we have traversed a great deal of political and ideological distance since George Padmore’s and C.L.R. James’s calls for a black internationalism that would serve as the vanguard of a world revolution against both capital and empire. The NIEO was, as we shall see, Marxist in its diagnosis of economic dependence, drawing on traditions of dependency and world systems theory [a dubious judgement, in more ways than one]. Ultimately, however, its prescriptions were articulated within the terms of a liberal political economy, a contradiction dependency and world systems theorists, whose critiques had in part inspired the NIEO, immediately recognized. Moreover, even within the terms of its international welfarism, the NIEO was not without its

blind spots, which were revealed as Third World solidarity frayed and the disanalogies between the domestic and international economies became visible' (145, emphasis mine; and cf. 'For Marxists like Samir Amin, the NIEO’s integrationist orientation to the global economy would only exacerbate economic dependence and further empower the postcolonial bourgeoisie and the urban sector, while marginalizing the larger rural sector', 168). Getachew's reference to the 'black Marxist roots of anticolonial worldmaking', which is directly relevant to the Black Atlantic, provokes an obvious question. Why do the case studies focus on issues that are remote from these roots? It is not that this is merely a passing reference - Getachew comments later in this chapter that 'despite its compelling vision of a global economy organized as a welfare world, the NIEO contained a number of tensions at the center of which was the analogy between domestic and international economic relations. First, while the formulation of postcolonial states as the workers and farmers of the world reframed and politicized the global economy, it evaded the question of the workers and farmers within postcolonial states. As I have suggested above, the program of a welfare world drew on a long-standing Marxist critique of colonial dependence but was also a departure from the black Marxist internationalism that had informed an earlier moment of anticolonial worldmaking. For instance, at the Fifth Pan-African Congress organized in 1945, Nkrumah had penned a Declaration of the Colonial Workers, Farmers, and Intellectuals, which called on the “workers and farmers of the Colonies” to use their weapons “the Strike and the Boycott” in the fight against colonial rule. In keeping with George Padmore’s vision of a Black International, Nkrumah positioned colonial workers and farmers as the vanguard of the impending anticolonial revolutions and of an international class war' (167). This throws the whole orientation of the book into sharp relief, and challenges the reader to figure out how Getachew ends up in this position. The answer is found in key moves in the Introduction, Chapter One, and Chapter Two respectively. Here Getachew identifies then casts aside a class-revolutionary perspective drawn from Marx, imposes an analytical framework that is not at all related to Black Atlantic or broader anticolonial traditions, and arbitrarily turns away from the class-revolutionary thought and action of Black Atlantic anticolonial thinkers and activists. Indeed, one of the most telling aspects of Worldmaking after Empire is just how quickly and confidently Getachew does dismiss a class-revolutionary perspective. Strikingly, she does not ignore it, but rather highlights it, then eliminates it from her enquiries. Marx makes a very early appearance, credited as the founder of 'the first antisystemic worldmaking project' (incidentally, it was also the world's first international organisation), but he is crucially seen as a theorist of empire rather than capital. Then, 'anti-imperialists of the colonized world' are credited with radicalizing Marx's vision through their more pointed critique of empire. And to round off the move, revolutionary class action is ruled out of court on the grounds that it was no longer available as an option after the collapse of the Third International. As a consequence, class warfare is faded out, to be replaced by anti-imperialism, construed as a struggle against imperialist states. This is all accomplished in less than a single page: 'The first antisystemic worldmaking project emerged ... with the founding of the International Workingmen’s Association in 1864. Both the Communist Manifesto and Karl

Marx’s Capital situated the rise of capitalist production and its creation of a world market in imperial expansion. "The dawn of the era of capitalist production," Marx argued, "was to be found in “the discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the indigenous populations of that continent, the beginnings of the conquest and plunder of India, and the conversion of Africa into a preserve for the commercial hunting of blackskins" [Capital, Vol. 1, Ch. 31). Through this violent domination, the European bourgeoisie sought to create “a world after its own image” and in turn produced the conditions of its own overcoming. In linking together disparate political parties and trade unions against the growing consolidation of an international system of nation-states, the First International envisioned a global emancipation of labor that would remake the world. Beginning at the turn of the twentieth century, anti-imperialists of the colonized world radicalized this Marxist critique of empire's political economy. They argued that Europe’s effort to produce “a world after its own image” through imperial expansion was always a chimera that belied colonial dependencies and inequalities. Imperial integration did not create one world but instead entailed racialized differentiation. After the Bolshevik revolution, and working within and beyond the Third International, inter-war anti-imperialists mobilized this critique to envision a reordering of the world that transcended imperial inequality and anticipated anti-imperial and often antistatist futures. Operating through transnational networks, internationalists experimented with political forms beyond and below the nation-state. They offered visions of a world after empire that ranged from Marcus Garvey’s transnational black nation organized through the Universal Negro Improvement Association to Padmore’s International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers, an arm of the Third International that fashioned black workers as the vanguard of the struggle against imperialism and capitalism. The worldmakers in this study traveled the circuits of interwar anti-imperial internationalisms. However, they arrived on the political stage at a moment after the fall of the Third International and when the mid-century collapse of empires coincided with the triumph of the nation-state. These conditions set limits on the range of political possibilities for anticolonial worldmaking' (3-4). The reference on p. 3 to capitalist production and the world market is the first and the last. Getachew presents Marx as an early critic and theorist of the political economy of empire, now superseded, not as a theorist of capital. It follows, for her, that anti-imperialists in the colonized world radicalized his approach, specifically through their privileging of racialized differentiation. And to the extent that she recognises that some (though not all) of them promoted class struggle against capitalism at some point, she implies that this was no longer an option in the post-war period. At stroke this move sidelines any theory of the capitalist mode of production, or any class-based revolutionary practice. But it is one thing to say that Marx situated the rise of capitalist production and its creation of a world market in imperial expansion (in part only, but still, true), and quite another to reduce it to this. It entails skipping entirely over the first 30 chapters of Capital to Chapter 31, 'The Genesis of the Industrial Capitalist', and ignoring not only its opening remarks on usurer's capital and merchant's capital, and the 'dissolution of the feudal bands of retainers, and the expropriation and partial eviction of the rural population', but also the passage that shortly follows the lines she cites (Penguin Classics, 1976, p. 915): 'These idyllic proceedings are the chief moments of primitive accumulation. Hard on their heels follows the commercial war of the European nations, which has the globe as its battlefield. It

begins with the revolt of the Netherlands from Spain, assumes gigantic dimensions in England's anti-Jacobin War, and is still going on in the shape of the Opium War against China, etc. The different moments of primitive accumulation can be assigned in particular to Spain, Portugal, Holland, France and England, in more or less chronological order. These different moments are systematically combined together at the end of the seventeenth century in England; the combination embraces the colonies, the national debt, the modern tax system, and the system of protection. These methods depend in part on brute force, for instance the colonial system. But they all employ the power of the state, the concentrated and organized force of society, to hasten, as in a hothouse, the process of transformation of the feudal mode of production into the capitalist mode, and to shorten the transition. Force is the midwife of every old society which is pregnant with a new one. It is itself an economic power' (ibid: 915-6, emphasis mine). The 'colonial system' reaches its peak under the Dutch, in the period of manufacture. But it is a moment only in the larger process that will eventuate in the emergence of a capitalist mode of production able to stand 'on its own feet' (ibid: 928). So, Chapter 31 concludes: 'Tantae molis erat [So massive a task it was] to unleash "the eternal natural laws" of the capitalist mode of production, to complete the process of separation between the workers and the conditions of their labour, to transform, at one pole, the social means of production and subsistence into capital, and at the opposite pole, the mass of the population into wage- labourers, into the free "labouring poor", the artificial product of modern history. If money, according to Augier [Marie Augier, Du crédit public, Paris, 1842, p. 265] comes into the world with a congenital blood-stain on one cheek, capital comes dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt' (ibid: 925-6). Marx's critique of political economy, and the analysis of the workings of the capitalist mode of production it allows, are entirely beyond Getachew's ken, and in this and her reading of class and capital purely in terms of race and empire she is not alone. As regards revolutionary politics, George Padmore did work in an 'arm of the Third International', as Getachew herself notes (70). While based in Hamburg in the early 1930s, he ran a 'front' organisation under instructions from the Comintern, seeking (without great success) to recruit African students and activists for training in Moscow. But he did not leave the Communist Party because he lost faith in revolutionary politics, and, to state the obvious, the fall of the Third International did not spell the end of revolutionary organisations, or revolution itself. Whether or not the switch on the part of the Comintern in 1934 from the strategy 'class against class' to that of the popular front against Fascism was the principal or sole reason for Padmore's resignation from the party is debated. But as it obliged members of the party in the colonial world to collaborate with their imperialist enemies (Britain, in Padmore's case) it does not suggest that he was thereby renouncing the idea of proletarian revolution, but if anything the opposite. And as again Getachew is aware, the goal of global proletarian revolution was taken on by the Trotskyist Fourth International: she quotes CLR James, as insisting in 1937 that the 'coming struggle against imperialism required a new “Fourth International of Trotsky” that would organize the working-class movement in Europe and colonized subjects under the banners of “turn the imperialist war into civil war. Abolish capitalism. Build international Socialism” (69). He joined it in 1938 (mentioned in passing, p. 8), and went on to play a prominent part in it. Astoundingly, you would not know from Worldmaking after Empire that revolutions took place

in China in 1949, and in Cuba (at the heart of the Caribbean) in 1959 - Getachew's failure to mention the latter, supported, albeit with hesitation and reservations, by the Soviet Union, being particularly striking. As regards Africa, there is no discussion of the Algerian Revolution, and although the 'assassination' of Patrice Lumumba, the Congolese African nationalist and Pan- Africanist who served as Prime Minister of the Republic of the Congo until he was captured and executed on 17 January 1961 by pro-imperialist secessionist forces is mentioned in passing, there is no analysis of his politics, or the wider context. Amilcar Cabral is identified later, in passing, as 'leading a guerrilla war against Portuguese rule in Guinea-Bissau' (73), but not otherwise discussed. As if by magic, then, by the end of the short introductory section on 'The Worlds of Pan-Africanism' (5-9), CLR James and proletarian revolution are already out of the picture. Getachew identifies the '1930s university generation, which included Azikiwe, Nkrumah, Padmore, and Williams' as shaping 'the first phase of anticolonial worldmaking in the age of decolonization': 'They deployed the new histories of slavery to critique empire as a form of enslavement, institutionalized the right to self-determination at the United Nations, achieved national independence, and worked to realize regional federation in Africa and the Caribbean'. She then characterises a 'second generation' - Michael Manley and Julius Nyerere - as moving towards Fabian socialism in 'the final and most ambitious phase of anticolonial worldmaking (sic)': 'A second generation of anticolonial worldmakers represented here by Michael Manley and Julius Nyerere responded to the limits of this first moment and articulated a new project of worldmaking. Born in the 1920s, both Manley and Nyerere were too young to travel the black internationalist circuits of the interwar period, and they came of age when the promises of communist internationalism had dissipated. While they did not share the formative experiences of the 1930s generation, they witnessed and supported the early moments of anticolonial worldmaking. Manley campaigned for Williams’s West Indian Federation while a student at the London School of Economics, and Nyerere directly participated in the debates about African union.When these projects failed, Nyerere and Manley returned to the question of imperialism’s hierarchical worldmaking and the distortions it created in postcolonial societies to reimagine a world after empire. At the center of this second phase of worldmaking was an effort to rethink socialism for these conditions and reestablish economic equality as the central ideal of a postimperial world. In doing so, Manley and Nyerere, educated at the London School of Economics and the University of Edinburgh respectively, drew on Fabian socialism and, in particular, the writings of Harold Laski. Interlocutors since their days in the United Kingdom, Manley’s and Nyerere’s distinctive socialist projects, coupled with their efforts to institutionalize the New International Economic Order, marked the final and most ambitious phase of anticolonial worldmaking (8-9, emphases mine). Getachew only wavers once from this post-revolutionary perspective: 'To the ire of the United States, and unlike Eric Williams in Trinidad, Manley had a close relationship with Fidel Castro and more thoroughly embraced the radical politics of the Third World' (151). But she does not expand on this, reverting instead to the safer world of Fabian socialism: 'Friends and interlocutors since their student days in the United Kingdom, Manley and Nyerere shaped a new vision of anticolonial worldmaking that culminated in the NIEO’s welfare world' (ibid). In short, class antagonism is 'recast' as inter-state politics, and revolution as redistribution. Inter- state (or 'North-South') politics is analogised to domestic class politics, but domestic class politics is at the same time understood in terms that are both reformist, and modelled directly

on the 'Western welfare state'. Manley and Nyerere can then be safely brought under the international welfare perspective of Gunnar Myrdal, although curiously Getachew also says that: 'In his 1965 Neocolonialism, Nkrumah rejected Myrdal's internationalisation of welfarism' (149), before settling for the view that 'his idea of a welfare world captures their vision' (160). This tendency to highlight Black Atlantic anticolonialism then to place it and reinterpret it in a 'Western' academic frame is the central feature of Getachew's 'political theory of decolonisation'. Getachew argues strongly against the idea that anticolonial nationalists 'appropriated the language of self-determination from the liberal internationalist tradition of Woodrow Wilson in order to secure independence from alien rule' (14), insisting that they had a strong critique of the existing order and a positive agenda of their own: 'Anticolonial worldmaking provided a far-reaching challenge to the Eurocentric character of this international order' (25). Ironically, though, when she turns to the task of 'rethink[ing] the critique of anticolonial nationalism specifically, and nationalism more broadly' (significantly, a topic much more of interest to contemporary anti-populist liberals than it was to anticolonial nationalists), she opts for an analytical framework derived entirely from Western academic liberal- cosmopolitan political theory. After an initial claim that 'nationalists argued that in the absence of legal, political, and economic institutions that realized an international principle of nondomination, the domestic politics of postcolonial states were constantly vulnerable to external encroachment and intervention' (4), and repeated reference to 'nondomination' or 'international nondomination' as a goal thereafter (9-10, 11, 15), Getachew offers the following: 'Anticolonial worldmaking - the project of overcoming international hierarchy and constituting a postimperial world - took the form of securing international nondomination. In using the republican language of nondomination to characterize this project, I aim to highlight the ways anticolonial worldmaking responded to the relations of domination and dependence that exceeded the formal guarantees of nonintervention' (23, emphasis mine). The term is hers, not theirs, and it provides a unified framework for introducing the three 'Black Atlantic' projects on which her account centres: 'Each of these projects offered a different strategy for achieving nondomination, but they were all envisioned as creating the necessary international conditions for postcolonial nation-building' (24). At the same time it provides a bridge to a critique of nationalism (via Kedourie, Habermas, Canovan and Cocks, 26-7). So when Getachew goes on to theorise 'from the specificity of the postcolonial condition', she does so from the start in a framework removed from the thought and experience of (Black Atlantic) anticolonial nationalists. Along come Beitz, Benhabib, (Jean) Cohen, Habermas, Pettit, Rawls and company, preparing the way for the idea that the 'persistence of unequal integration and hierarchy calls for a postcolonial cosmopolitanism that recenters the problem of empire' (32, emphasis mine). This follows: 'With its critical and diagnostic orientation focused on the present configurations of international hierarchy, the normative and utopian core of a postcolonial cosmopolitanism remains the principle of nondomination at the center of anticolonial worldmaking. Nondomination recasts the current configurations of international hierarchy as infringements on collective projects of self-government' (33). As this makes clear, 'anticolonial worldmaking' is not a radical/revolutionary project arising in the Black Atlantic, but a concoction of Getachew's own, anchored to 'nondomination' and construed in terms of 'postcolonial cosmopolitanism'. It follows, as night follows day, that the focus on revolutionary or at least anti-imperialist activity in the colonial world falls away, to be replaced by a tepid international cosmopolitan liberalism focused on the responsibility of Western states to do a bit better by their former colonial subjects: 'A postcolonial cosmopolitanism that takes seriously the idea that hierarchy and

unequal integration are structural features of the international order entails a more expansive account of political responsibility rather than a limited duty of assistance' (33, 35). This imposes on a variety of anticolonial national discourses a singular logic alien to them, and a notion of political responsibility that they neither invoked nor recognised. It follows directly that it is not at all the case that 'the age of decolonization anticipated and reconfigured our contemporary questions about international political and economic justice', as initially claimed. Rather, Getachew has appropriated and grossly distorted anticolonial nationalism in support of her own project of modest liberal-cosmopolitan international reform, and the conclusion of the chapter confirms that her focus has now switched entirely to the 'West': 'The central lessons of anticolonial worldmaking - that hierarchy rather than sovereign equality structures the international order, that nondomination must be a central principle of a postimperial international order, and that a commitment to nondomination enhances rather than detracts from internationalis - can inform our own projects of worldmaking' (36, emphasis mine). It is easy for Getachew to demonstrate, in the following chapter, that the international order of the League of Nations preserved racial hierarchy, and she does it convincingly. The chapter then concludes with a short 'critique of colonial slavery' (67-70) that opens as follows: The Italian invasion [of Ethiopia] galvanized critics of empire throughout the African diaspora and marked a critical turning point in the politics of black anticolonialism. The worldmakers in this study fashioned a new Pan-Africanism in the context of their increasing disillusionment with the League of Nations and their efforts to come to terms with the limits of the Communist International. Exemplary of this shift, the works and political activities of W.E.B. Du Bois, C.L.R. James, and George Padmore during the 1930s index an effort to revise and restate the critique of imperialism. The upshot of this effort was the revival of Pan-Africanism as a distinctive internationalism - one that centered a critique of colonialism as a dual structure of slavery and racial hierarchy. This Pan-Africanism drew on and was deeply influenced by Lenin’s account of self-determination but increasingly fashioned itself as an autonomous project of world revolution in which colonized subjects, rather than the metropolitan proletariat, were the key agents of global transformation' (67). I confess at this point to finding it baffling that the case studies are not selected from among, say, Garveyism, the international activities of WEB Du Bois, Pan-Africanism in the inter-war period, the Manchester Congress of 1945, Padmore's International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers, CLR James's activity in the Fourth International, Padmore and James's joint International African Service Bureau, or the 'socialist projects' pursued by Manley and Nyerere (the nationalisation of the bauxite industry and the introduction of 'village socialism' respectively). But as we know, they are not. The point of interest here is that this presents Getachew with the problem of bridging from the 'critique of colonial slavery' to three case studies that do not focus on either slavery or racial hierarchy at all. She does it in just a few lines at the end of the chapter: 'The Black International imagined in the unrealized [Negro World Unity] congress and subsequently enacted in Padmore and James’s 1937 International African Service Bureau, and the 1945 Fifth Pan-African Congress in Manchester staked out an autonomous space for black radicalism. Emerging “out of and against the communist international,” this iteration of Pan- Africanism fashioned itself as the site of a new project of world revolution directed against

colonial slavery. The institutional contours of this project were as yet undecided at the dawn of World War II. But as we shall see, in its aftermath, the growing cohort of Pan-Africanists would pursue a project of national independence coupled with anticolonial worldmaking that sought to secure nondomination within the international order. Central to this was a return to and refashioning of the revolutionary possibilities that the right to self-determination had promised in 1917' (70) This is an extraordinary move on Getachew's part. She is perfectly well aware that there were a number of related projects across the 'Black Atlantic' in this period that added up to 'a new project of world revolution directed against colonial slavery'. But she chooses to ignore them, opting instead for projects that were either purely local and decidedly umnrevolutionary (regional federation), or were not pursued by 'the growing cohort of Pan-Africanists', and did not reflect anticolonial worldmaking so much as a postcolonial cosmopolitan perspective centred on 'nondomination'. As a consequence, Lenin is despatched just as efficiently as Marx was earlier: far from reflecting 'a return to and refashioning of the revolutionary possibilities that the right to self-determination had promised in 1917', the postcolonial cosmopolitan perspective makes the Western (imperialist) states themselves the arbiters of change, and enjoins upon them only a heightened sense of political responsibility. As suggested at the outset, then, Getachew is engaged here in a process of mythmaking, not a reconstruction of worldmaking. In the brief epilogue she ascribes the 'fall of self-determination and the origins of our contemporary international order' to 'the ideological and institutional transformations that began in the 1970s', but imagines a previous period of thirty years that were 'characterized by the anticolonial quest for a domination-free international order that radicalized the meaning of sovereign equality'; although its challenge faded, '[s]elf- determination as worldmaking and nation-building and the postcolonial state imagined as the agent of international and domestic transformation were central to building a world after empire' (180, emphasis mine). And the 'vision of a postimperial world order that gave rise to three decades of anticolonial worldmaking appears far removed from our political present', only if we 'evade reckoning with the ways that we inhabit as our present the promises and ruins of anticolonial worldmaking': 'The incomplete decolonization that culminated in a world of unequal nation-states, the regional organizations that emerged from the dream of federation, and the visions of global justice that stand in the place of the NIEO’s welfare world indicate the scale of both expectations and disappointments that characterized anticolonial worldmaking. Examining this present, it would be a mistake to collapse the partiality and eventual decline of a set of languages and strategies for making a world after empire with the demise of the moral and political vision that looked forward to an egalitarian and domination-free world'. It is only here, in the closing pages of the Epilogue, that the full character of the book is revealed. None of these remarks is supported by the analysis that has gone before: self- determination as worldmaking and nation-building and the postcolonial state imagined as the agent of international and domestic transformation were not central to building a world after empire, nor was the early period of decolonisation 'characterized by the anticolonial quest for a domination-free international order that radicalized the meaning of sovereign equality'. Least of all, on the evidence of the case studies presented, did what there was of any substance

represent the agency of the Black Atlantic world. To return, then, to the statement highlighted at the head of this review, Getachew's 'postcolonial cosmopolitanism' does not draw on 'the conceptual and political innovations of anticolonial worldmaking'. Rather, it creates a myth, inventing connections that are not there, and supporting them by strategies of juxtaposition and loose association. It does not entail 'a critical diagnosis of the persistence of empire'. Rather, it entails a critical diagnosis of nationalism, and one that owes far more to liberal hostility to 'populism' than it does to the radical/revolutionary internationalism of significant currents in the 'Black Atlantic' and beyond. Nor does it retain 'the anti-imperial aspiration for a domination-free international order'. Rather, it unceremoniously suppresses such radical and revolutionary currents as did arise in and around the 'Black Atlantic', and shifts the focus to liberal- cosmopolitan political theory, as if 'anticolonial worldmakers' really wanted nothing more than an attitude of greater 'political responsibility' on the part of the 'West'. In short, this is not so much an account of worldmaking as a sustained exercise in mythmaking.

(88) Adom Getachew, Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination, Princeton University Press, 2019.

2022, What's Worth Reading

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Postcolonial Studies,

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Black Atlantic

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More mythmaking than worldmaking.

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