Return of the Repressed

Postcolonial leaders chose sovereignty and were haunted by economics. European leaders chose economics and were haunted by politics.

Reading Gyan Prakash and Jeremy Adelman’s interesting collection Inventing the Third World (Bloomsbury, 2023) got me thinking this morning that the global history of the second half of the twentieth century presented two great experiments in political design, which unfolded simultaneously but along opposing logics, each of which has ended in failure for mirror-image reasons.

On the one hand, there was the process of world-building that emerged with the end of European empires. Across the postcolonial world — from West Africa to South Asia to the Caribbean — leaders who had spent decades fighting for self-determination arrived at independence with an overwhelming conviction: political autonomy first, development to follow. The primary wound they were healing was political, the humiliation of foreign rule, and so the remedy they reached for was political. While many forms of postcolonial political configuration and confederation were considered, eventually the form of the sovereign nation-state become hegemonic.

What haunted these states afterward was economics. Commodity dependence, debt cycles, structural adjustment conditionalities, and the slow hemorrhage of capital to metropolitan financial centers revealed that formal sovereignty without economic autonomy was, in too many cases, sovereignty in name only. The flags had changed; the terms of trade had not. Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah had warned as much with his concept of neo-colonialism, but the warning proved easier to articulate than to escape. Across the continent and beyond, the political achievement of independence was perpetually shadowed by the question that politics alone could not answer: who controls the resources, the credit, and the price? “Postcolonial leaders chose politics first,” notes Samuel Moyn in his coda, “only to find economics haunting their choice.”

On the other hand, in the postcolony’s former metropole of Europe, the logic ran in reverse. Leaders who had watched nationalist passions detonate two contintental-scale bloodbaths in a single generation concluded that nationalism itself was the pathology to be treated, and that economic integration was the medicine. Begin with coal and steel, then trade, then a common market, then a currency — and politics, they trusted, would follow from (neo)functional necessity, without the need for democratic mobilization. Indeed, a desire to insulate institutions from populist fervors subtended much of the political structuration of the European Union.

For decades this sequencing seemed to work. It produced prosperity, stability, and a continent that ceased to be a charnel house. A post-historical perpetual peace of neo-Kantian fantasy. But the deferred political question did not dissolve; it accumulated under the banner of a so-called “democratic deficit” — a problem already noted 40 years ago, before the European Union was even formally consecrated in 1993. The insulation of key decisions from popular accountability and specifically the management of the post-2008 eurozone crisis by technocratic fiat has provoked the very backlash that Brussels had hoped economic success would preempt. To invert Moyn’s point about the postcolony: Europe's leaders, in putting economics first, have found themselves haunted by politics.

The symmetry is almost too neat: the post-colony and post-empire, both reaching to address their respective deepest historical trauma, only to find that the other end of political economy has refused to go away.