ABSTRACT
This chapter is organized around the claim that decolonization and the Cold War were component parts of a larger story: the rise of the twentieth-century nation-state. The emergence of the nation-state beyond its geographies of origin – Europe and the United States – occurred alongside the creation of internationalist institutions that regulated interstate behaviour. These two processes shaped each other; it is impossible to understand one without the other. In substantiating this thesis, the chapter fi rst places self-determination within a global conversation about the national state. Even as consensus deepened after World War I that government planning could manage globalization and make modernity universal, disagreement spread over the benefi t (and possibility) of international interdependence. The United States was an important but ambiguous prism for this contest, shaped in equal measure by progressive advocacy and racial discrimination. Washington’s embrace of the United Nations frames the chapter’s second section and provides a window to refl ect on the mid-century intersections of decolonization and the Cold War. The liberal order fused development thinking with international interdependence in a way that addressed the tensions of the interwar years and facilitated the creation of several large national states in Asia. Within this “One World,” tensions over capitalism and empire culminated in the mid-1950s and the chapter’s fi nal section turns to the exigencies that accompanied second-wave decolonization. The number of nationstates doubled in the decade after 1955. By exploring the subtle diff erences between panAsianism and pan-Africanism, the chapter sheds light on the signifi cance of the Black Atlantic’s independence during the Cold War. Even as black states successfully challenged racism and universalized development, they raised diffi cult questions about the U.N.’s political purpose and the economic capacity of small postcolonial polities with limited resources. Although the nation-state was everywhere by the late 1960s, its ubiquity masked new divisions over the meaning of sovereignty, autonomy, and U.N. membership.
