P a g e | 1 Anti-imperial World Politics: Race, class, and internationalism in the making of post-colonial order Christopher Patrick Murray London School of Economics and Political Science PhD. International Relations P a g e | 2 I certify that this thesis which I am presenting for examination for the PhD degree in International Relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science is solely my own work. I consider the work submitted to be a complete thesis fit for examination. I authorise that, if a degree is awarded, an electronic copy of my thesis will be deposited in LSE Theses Online (in accordance with the published deposit agreement) held by the British Library of Political and Economic Science and that, except as provided for in regulation 61 it will be made available for public reference. I authorise the School to supply a copy of the abstract of my thesis for inclusion in any published list of theses offered for higher degrees in British universities or in any supplement thereto, or for consultation in any central file of abstracts of such theses. Word count…………………………………….……….. 75, 884 P a g e | 3 ABSTRACT Anti-imperial world politics: Race, class, and internationalism in the making of post-colonial order Christopher Murray, PhD. LSE International Relations Why did many ‘black’ anti-imperial thinkers and leaders articulate projects for colonial freedom based in transnational identities and solidarities? This thesis excavates a discourse of anti-imperial globalism, which helped shape world politics from the early to late 20th century. Although usually reduced to the anticolonial nationalist politics of sovereignty and recognition, this study interprets ‘anti-imperialism globalism from below’ as a transnational counter-discourse, primarily concerned with social justice, social freedom, and equality. Anti-imperial globalism emerged and changed in response to developing world events, but it was also shaped by boundary-crossing discourses. One discourse understood global progress as dependent on the ability of different societies to unite through large-scale organisation and political integration. These political visions – which were often articulated as ‘federation’ – were enabled, but ultimately limited, by a second dominant discourse of racial hierarchy and race development. I argue that anti-imperial strategies changed throughout the 20th century not because the hierarchical relations of empire were defeated, but because empire was able to rehabilitate itself according to more ethno-culturally inclusive principles of global governance. This thesis makes two contributions to existing literature. Firstly, it builds on recent debates concerning empire, decolonisation, and world order. Empire is usually conceptualised as one polity’s alien rule over another, or, along with nation-states and international institutions, another type of unitary actor. This effectively flattens imperial relations into a coloniser/colonised binary, and relegates them to a distant, deniable past which predated the post-1945 nation- state system. Tracing the histories of men and women who struggled against empire reveals it as a productive and adaptable form of transnational power, which created stratified yet lasting social identities. Secondly, in pursuing this historical-relational approach to empire and race, this study offers an alternative to sovereignty and recognition based models of state, political community, and world order. P a g e | 4 Anti-imperial World Politics: Race, class, and internationalism in the making of post-colonial order Table of Contents Chapter One. Introduction: Anti-imperialism as world politics.…………………………………………………... 6 1.1. Recovering anti-imperial globalism ‘from below’…………………………………………………….6 1.2. Anti-imperial globalism and racialisation.………………………….……………………………… 10 1.3. Sovereignty and difference……………………………………………................................................. 18 1.4. Empire and race in IR, towards an historical-relational approach…………………………………. 25 1.5. Structure of the thesis…………………………………………………………………………...… 33 Chapter Two. Imperial modernity and its others: Theory of anti-imperial world politics……………................ 36 2.1. Introduction……………………………………………………………………………................... 36 2.2. Beyond diffusion: pluralising anti-imperial world politics…………………………………………. 39 2.3. Generative empire: imperialism and the modern mode of power……………………….................... 46 2.4. The structure of anti-imperial counter-discourse………………………………………………….. 53 2.4.1. A modern discourse………………………………………………………………………... 53 2.4.2. Colonial recognition and imperial dialectics…………………………………………………… 57 2.4.3. Discursive transformation and the normalisation of the nation-state……………………………… 66 Chapter Three. ‘World Civilisation’ between the wars: counter-hegemonic ideas of global progress, 1919-1930…………………………………………... 76 3.1. Introduction……………………………………………………………………………................... 76 3.2. Civilisational difference – essentialist and ‘post-essentialist’ conceptions………………………….. 79 3.3. Saving civilisation - liberal hegemony and conflict after WWI ………………………........................ 82 3.4. Civilisation as an articulation of counter-imperial discourse ………………………………………. 87 3.4.1. The construction of African difference……………………………………………….................. 87 3.4.2. Nation-building and elite global visions………………………………………………………. 97 3.5. ‘Civilisation(s)’ and the emergence of anti-imperial globalist critique……………………................ 106 P a g e | 5 3.5.1. Rival leaders and the progress debate………………………………………………………... 106 3.5.2. ‘Civilisationism’ and its discontents……………………………………………….................. 112 Chapter Four. To unite the many against the few: ‘Revolution’ in the black Atlantic, 1930-1956……………………………………………………… 122 4.1. Introduction……………………………………………………………………………………... 122 4.2. ‘Revolution’ as an articulation of anti-imperial world politics…………………………………….. 126 4.2.1. Colonial Communism assembles and unravels………………………………………………... 126 4.2.2. The Italo-Abyssinian War and the politics of intercontinental unity…………………………….. 134 4.3. Intersections of anti-imperial revolution – race, gender, class, and culture…………......................... 145 4.3.1. Racial sovereignty and interracial unity…………………………………………….................. 145 4.3.2. Gender emancipation and anti-imperial revolution……………………………………………. 166 4.3.3. Building unity and cultural pluralism………………………………………………………. 172 Chapter Five. Development and Liberation, The rise and fall of post-colonial federal socialism, 1945-1975.………………………………...... 178 5.1. Introduction……………………………………………………………………………………... 178 5.2. Global visions and the ideology of the federal development state ……………………………….. 183 5.2.1. The emergence of federal socialism…………………………………………………………... 184 5.2.2. Federalism from below……………………………………………………………………. 194 5.2.3. Liberation as cultural transformation and non-deterministic dialectics…………………………… 203 5.3. Hierarchy strikes back: shifting allegiances in the age of development…………................................ 210 5.3.1. Hierarchy and divergence………………………………………………………………….. 210 5.3.2. The Cold War frame……………………………………………………………………... 218 5.4. Post-Cold War developments……………………………………………………………….…… 226 Chapter Six. Conclusion……………………………………………………...…………………………………... 236 Bibliography and References……………………………………………………………………… 244 Acknowledgements……………………………………………………………………………...…. 268 P a g e | 6 Chapter One Introduction: Anti-imperialism as world politics 1.1. Recovering anti-imperial globalism ‘from below’ Over the course of the 20th century, politics based in different national, international, and transnational solidarities played out against a backdrop of global upheavals. These upheavals – world war, economic crisis, revolution -- appeared to offer opportunities to transform race relations within societies, as well as more fundamentally address political and economic hierarchy within the dominant Euro-American configuration of world order. While these political solidarities helped bring about a renewed post-colonial order based upon the image of an international system of sovereign nation-states, theoretically rich discourses on social justice, social freedom, and egalitarian democracy sought more than national sovereignty and self-determination for the post-colonial state. This study excavates the international political theory of one such discourse and reveals how political ideas advocating an anti-imperial globalism from below emerged concomitantly with more familiar and well-studied anticolonial nationalist discourses. This study attempts to offer a better understanding of why so many ‘black’ thinkers and leaders articulated projects for colonial freedom based in transnational identities and solidarities.1 It concentrates on the connected trajectories of two proposed unions, both as they were imagined as ‘top-down’ and ‘bottom-up’ projects: Pan-African federation and West Indies Federation. A central, yet under-acknowledged, aspect of anti-imperial political thought was the goal of creating a new kind of multinational state and/or a poly-racial 1 For aesthetic reasons I have limited the use of scare quotes around Western, non-Western, native, black, white and their variants, but do use them periodically to emphasise the contested character of these terms. P a g e | 7 citizenry.2 From the end of WWI to the beginning of the 1960s, activists and leaders from the colonies argued and organised for an end to the existing colonial order, but they also argued and organised for a deeper