Introduction 9 10 11 It Is Necessary That the Imperialist Concept of the Nation-State Give 12 Way Definitively to the Modern Concept of the Multinational State
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1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 INTRODUCTION 9 10 11 It is necessary that the imperialist concept of the nation- state give 12 way definitively to the modern concept of the multinational state. 13 — Mamadou Dia, 1955 14 15 The future of the 110 million men and women who live under our 16 flag is in an organization of federative form. 17 — Charles de Gaulle, 1946 18 19 Each [territory], in the framework of French sovereignty, should 20 receive its own status, depending on the very variable degree of 21 its development, regulating the ways and means by which the rep- 22 resentatives of its French or indigenous inhabitants debate among 23 themselves internal affairs and take part in their management. 24 — Charles de Gaulle, 1947 1 25 26 In the decades after World War II, the colonial empires in Africa gave 27 way to over forty nation- states. How can we think about the man- 28 ner in which this transformation took place? The words of Mamadou 29 Dia— one of the leading political activists of French West Africa in the 30 1950s, later Senegal’s first prime minister—should make us think be- 31 yond the conventional narrative of nationalist triumph. They should 32 make us rethink as well the standard view of global political history of 33 the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as a long and inexorable transi- 34 tion from empire to nation- state. Nation and modernity, we are often 35 told, go hand in hand. Dia was saying that the nation- state was neither 36 modern nor desirable. 37 Dia’s views were widely shared among political leaders in French 38 West Africa. Their politics was firmly anticolonialist, but not national- 39 ist in the ordinary, territorially focused, sense. Almost all agreed that 40 41 42 1 Mamadou Dia, La Condition Humaine, 29 August 1955; Charles de Gaulle, speech at Bayeux, 16 June 1946, reprinted in Charles de Gaulle, Discours et messages 1940– 1946 43 (Paris: Berger- Levraut, 1946), 721– 27; Charles de Gaulle, speech in Bordeaux, reported 44 in Le Monde, 17 May 1947. 45 PUP_Cooper_Citizenship between Empire and Nation_Intro.indd 1 Achorn International 04/25/2014 11:14PM 1 the colonies of French West Africa, eight small states with popula- 2 tions ranging from half a million to four million, were doomed to 3 poverty and subordination if they tried to survive as independent 4 nation- states. French West African political leaders sought instead to 5 transform colonial empire into another sort of assemblage of diverse 6 territories and peoples: a federation of African states with each other 7 and with France. 8 Charles de Gaulle’s very name evokes the idea of a strong French 9 state. Yet in 1946 and 1947 he was saying that such a state could not be 10 unitary. It would have to acknowledge the diversity of the territories 11 that constituted it. In calling for a federal state, he did not need to tell 12 his listeners that fewer than half of the 110 million French people he 13 referred to lived in European France. 14 De Gaulle’s federalism was not the same as Dia’s. It put more em- 15 phasis on the federating state— France— than on the federated states. 16 Neither federalism was classic, for neither posited a fully equal rela- 17 tionship among the federated components. Dia was more interested 18 than de Gaulle in setting a political process in motion— as a movement 19 toward the equality of African and European components of the fed- 20 eration. De Gaulle was above all interested in the federation remain- 21 ing French, even if he recognized that not everyone would be French 22 in the same way. 23 Why were such views imaginable in the 1940s and 1950s, 150 years 24 after the creation of the French Republic as the incarnation of the 25 French nation, at a time when Africans and Asians were seemingly 26 striving for the kind of state Europeans supposedly had? If the basic 27 narrative of transition from empire to nation- state is right, de Gaulle 28 should have been defending a resolutely French France, with colo- 29 nies as wholly subordinate entities, and Dia should have been claim- 30 ing national independence.2 Yet most political activists in French 31 West Africa— from the radical Sékou Touré to the conservative Félix 32 Houphouët- Boigny— sought some variant on the federal theme. Our 33 expectations of what their history should have been are a backward 34 projection of an idealized post- 1960 world of sovereign nation- states.3 35 36 2 37 Great Britain and the Netherlands were also considering different forms of fed- eration as a response to the crisis of empire at the end of World War II, both to make 38 regional development more manageable and to give a new legitimacy to an imperial 39 polity. Michael Collins, “Decolonisation and the ‘Federal Moment,’ ” Diplomacy and State- 40 craft 24 (2013): 21–40; Jennifer Foray, “A Unified Empire of Equal Parts: The Dutch 41 Commonwealth Schemes of the 1920s– 40s,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 42 41 (2013): 259– 84. 3 John Kelly and Martha Kaplan also see the nation- state as a concept that became 43 salient only after World War II, projected backward to fit a narrative that portrays it 44 as natural and modern. “Nation and Decolonization: Toward a New Anthropology of 45 Nationalism,” Anthropological Theory 1 (2001): 419– 37. 2 q INTRODUCTION PUP_Cooper_Citizenship between Empire and Nation_Intro.indd 2 Achorn International 04/25/2014 11:14PM We can easily miss the kinds of approaches that political actors 1 were pursuing. We know some turned into dead ends; the people in- 2 volved did not. This book tells the story of how it happened that in 3 1960 the political actors of France and French West Africa ended up 4 with a form of political organization that neither had wanted during 5 most of the previous fifteen years. 6 In France, the colonial past was for some decades marginalized from 7 even the best historical scholarship. By the 1990s, it was reappearing 8 in some fine research, mostly by younger scholars making use of new 9 archival sources.4 More polemical works were also taking their place in 10 public discourse, turning upside down French self-representations as 11 the people of the rights of man. In such a perspective, colonial exploi- 12 tation and oppression were not mere sidelights to French history, but 13 an intrinsic part of French republicanism, its evil twin.5 The critique 14 of France’s colonial past brought out anxieties among French intel- 15 lectuals: about a French population divided between the descendants 16 of “colonizers” and “colonized,” about a society made up of multiple 17 ethnic communities. 18 These debates have raised serious issues and include thoughtful 19 works, but they have become so focused on defending or attacking the 20 concept of “the colonial” or “the postcolonial” that they have moved 21 away from the lived experiences the concept was supposed to eluci- 22 date.6 The best way, to my mind, to move beyond this state of play is to 23 get directly to the point: not the arguments of 2014 but those of 1945 24 to 1960; not what we now think people should have said in a colonial 25 situation, but what they actually said, wrote, and did; not the suppos- 26 edly immanent logics of preidentified types of political regimes, but 27 the give- and- take of political actors in a time of profound uncertainty, 28 29 4 See for example Raphaëlle Branche, La torture et l’armée pendant la guerre d’Algérie 30 1954– 1962 (Paris: Gallimard, 2001) or articles collected in the special dossier “Sujets 31 d’empire,” Genèses 53 (2003/4). Some of the best analyses of colonialism focused on 32 the erasure of the subject from historical memory. See for example Benjamin Stora, La gangrène et l’oubli: La mémoire de la guerre d’Algérie (Paris: La Découverte, 1998). 33 5 Examples include Pascal Blanchard, Nicolas Bancel, and Sandrine Lemaire, La 34 fracture coloniale: la société française au prisme de l’héritage colonial (Paris: La Découverte, 2005), 35 and Olivier Le Cour Grandmaison, La République impériale: politique et racisme d’État (Paris: 36 Fayard, 2009). 37 6 This tendency toward abstraction can be found in the contributions to the debate over France and postcolonialism in Public Culture 23, 1 (2011). For a French scholar’s at- 38 tack on postcolonial studies, see Jean-François Bayart, Les études postcoloniales. Un carnaval 39 académique (Paris: Karthala, 2010). Useful discussions include Marie- Claude Smouts, 40 ed., La situation postcoloniale: Les Postcolonial Studies dans le débat français (Paris: Les Presses 41 de Sciences Po, 2007), and Romain Bertrand, Mémoires d’empire: La controverse autour du 42 “fait colonial” (Paris: Éd. du Croquant, 2006). On the connections between colonialism and “immigration” today, see Charles Tshimanga, Didier Gondola, and Peter J. Bloom, 43 eds., Frenchness and the African Diaspora: Identity and Uprising in Contemporary France (Blooming- 44 ton: Indiana University Press, 2009). 45 INTRODUCTION r 3 PUP_Cooper_Citizenship between Empire and Nation_Intro.indd 3 Achorn International 04/25/2014 11:14PM 1 the words and actions of people who were trying to figure out what 2 they wanted and what they might possibly obtain. 3 What lies between the “colonial” and the “post”? Not an event, not 4 a moment, but a process. For some fifteen years, people struggled— 5 and sometimes fought— over alternative visions of how to transform 6 the French colonial empire, to make it more durable, to make it more 7 democratic and progressive, or to bring it to an end.