Drawing Africa's Map: the Decision to Uphold Colonial Boundaries Cris Boonen Phd Candidate, Leiden University December 2012 AB
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Drawing Africa’s Map: The Decision to Uphold Colonial Boundaries Cris Boonen PhD Candidate, Leiden University December 2012 ABSTRACT How did the African statesmen come to agree upon maintaining the colonial map and how have alternatives to the inherited colonial boundaries been marginalised and forgotten? The decision to uphold the colonial boundaries was not straightforward, nor was it universally supported on the African continent around the time of decolonisation. Over the course of the negotiations, the formally expressed border demands of Africa’s independence movements shifted from abolition in 1945, to adjustment at the All-African Peoples Conference in 1958, to stability at the OAU’s founding summit in 1963. So although alternatives were available – and considered – at this critical junction, African statesmen dismissed them by subscribing to the prevailing norms on border stability. In this paper, I argue that this decision was based on a conceptualisation of the unknown, that is, on how uncertainties were presented as risks. Under the circumstances of serious uncertainty about future (inter)national security and the potential threats to it, the African statesmen deemed that the potential risks for the international order related to alternative boundary regimes would be grave while adherence to the uti possidetis principle would prevent major destabilisation. But I hold that this perception of the situation was not the only possible outcome. Rather, it was shaped by three sets of factors: 1) changes in the international environment, particularly in international representations of causes of conflict and legitimate statehood, 2) the development of institutional constraints during the process of decolonisation, and 3) evolution of domestic preferences on the basis of the negotiators’ information on conflict potentials and ideological differences between themselves. KEYWORDS: Boundary politics, uti possidetis principle, uncertainty, risk management. Prior to independence, many African political parties advocated adjustment of boundaries to accord with local realities on the African continent. International borders here had been drawn by the colonial European leaders as part of the so-called ‘Scramble for Africa’ while unilateral boundaries were changed frequently, which meant that many of them were effected by ignorance of demographic and ethnographic factors and arguably a willingness to divide. Indeed, Barbour and Prothero (1961) calculated that approximately forty-four per cent of the modern African boundaries follow meridian and parallel lines, thirty per cent are mathematical lines (straight lines, arcs, curves, etc.) and only twenty-six per cent correspond to geographical features such as rivers and mountains (cited by Kapil, 1966: 660). So when the leaders of African liberation movements discussed the possibility of independence prior to the end of the Second World War, they raised the question of how to capture in a set of 1 international borders the complex social reality of overlapping authorities, populations, interactions and movements. At that point in time, all options were open to the African political leaders: they could have decided to abolish the borders and create a continent-wide state, they could have decided to redraw the colonial borders on the basis of historical possession, effective control or the principle of nationality, or they could even have rejected the state structure as we know it all together and have returned to pre-colonial forms of alliance or city states. Yet as independence became a tangible reality, these divergent possibilities were delegitimised and slowly shut down. More and more statesmen supported adherence to colonial boundaries while alternative boundary regimes were discarded. At the 1945 Pan-African Congress in Manchester, the African nationalist leaders still adopted a resolution proclaiming that “the artificial divisions and territorial boundaries created by the imperialist powers are deliberate steps to obstruct the political unity of the West African peoples”. Less than fifteen years later, at the 1959 Sanniquellie Conference and the 1960 Conference of Independent States, the balance had shifted from a communal to a territorial interpretation of state legitimacy. Contrary to the earlier belief that borders along communal lines would improve inter-state relations, opinions at the latter conference converged on the idea that attempts to redraw borders would results in conflict and outside interference. Ultimately, the African statesmen – under the auspices of the Organisation of African Unity – subscribed to a policy accurately described by the president of Mali declared at the OAU’s founding summit in 1963: “[W]e must take Africa as it is”. They affirm their commitment to the territorial status quo in the 1964 Cairo Resolution. The question is how the rising African leaders came to agree upon maintaining the colonial map, a decision that has been taken as the origin of many of Africa’s contemporary problems related to state- and nation-building (e.g. Englebert, Tarango and Carter, 2002; Michalopoulos and Papaioannou, 2011; Alesina, Easterly and Matuszeki, 2011; Atzili, 2012). As they were heading for independence, they could have opted to fundamentally revise the colonial boundaries. Yet they decided to maintain the boundaries drawn by their predecessors on the basis of the uti possidetis principle. How did the alternatives to boundary maintenance, based on alternative configurations of power, become no-goes? In other words, how did the African statesmen agree to impose uniformity and rigidity with regard to nation-statism and boundary maintenance on the complex social reality? This question will be addressed by first identifying that the ‘strategic’ character of the decision for the uti possidetis principle is not given. Rather, the decision is the outcome of a series of historical contingencies and a particular conceptualisation of reality in which the uncertainty of altering borders is associated with unrest. Border maintenance, on the contrary, is associated with limited interstate territorial disputes and international stability. This particular conceptualisation of reality was shaped by three factors: 1) changes in the international environment, 2) the development of institutional constraints during the process of decolonisation, and 3) evolution of domestic preferences on the basis of information available to the negotiators. Boundary Maintenance upon Independence Regardless of variations in material or economic strength between the African states and despite the various serious proposals to adopt an alternative boundary regime, the new African statesmen consented on the maintenance of the colonial map upon their independence. The many attempts to convince African nationalist leaders to either abolish borders altogether and 2 create a continental state or to adjust borders to conform to patterns on the ground have been unsuccessful. Border adjustment on the basis of historical possession, for example, was discarded by referring to pre-colonial forms of political organisation as ‘tribalism’ (Davidson, 1992: 74-75). It often lacked territorial parameters and thus certain and permanent spatial expressions.1 Hence the leaders negotiating Africa’s post-colonial borders found this political structure hard to absorb into their view of statehood, which was grounded in the concept of territorial sovereignty. The call for territorial changes on the basis of national self- determination was similarly rejected. It was deemed to create difficulties for the articulation of a uniformly applicable principle, which would subsequently make it subject of much criticism based on its alleged inconsistency, indeterminacy and resultant imbalance in state power. In this fashion, all alternatives to boundary maintenance became impossible for the African statesmen to agree upon. The result is that although the nationalist leaders of states such as Morocco and Somalia have continued to oppose the adoption of the uti possidetis principle (with the Moroccans arguing in favour of redrawing borders to re-establish its past empire while the Somalis claimed neighbouring territories on the basis of their ethnic composition), all African states have in fact gained independence within their colonial boundaries. Morocco’s unrecognised annexation of the Western Sahara and Somalia’s failed attempts to occupy the Ogaden only strengthen the proof of the African leaders’ commitment to permit no adjustments to their colonial boundaries. The colonial map has been fixed beyond independence. Explanations for the African commitment have varied from external (colonial) pressure to African leaders’ desire to consolidate their power and the system of international norms on state recognition. (Internalised) pressure by colonial powers Some scholars argue that the African leaders have taken the decision to uphold the colonial boundaries under the influence and cooperation with the superpowers. Particularly the (ex-)colonial powers are theorised to have been of notable importance to the African choice of a boundary regime. Basil Davidson (1992), for example, argues that the French and British colonial officers have steered African politics towards boundary maintenance by consciously adopting policies that favoured the nation-state over other entities. In Britain, he holds, it was generally understood that nation-states had to be formed that developed constitutions framed on British lines. In order to achieve