For too long, the histories of the United Nations (UN) and other international organizations were blighted by the misconception that institutional history tended to be rather inward looking and teleological in its treatment of themes and issues, offering few insights on the political functioning of organizations. In more recent years, there has been a renewed interest in this type of history, from Susan Pedersen’s field-changing The Guardians, to Sunil Amrith and Glenda Sluga’s “New Histories of the United Nations” and Amy Sayward’s The United Nations in International History, all of which have all served to explode that perception.[1] Eva-Maria Muschik’s Building States is an outstanding addition to this expanding field that makes several very important contributions to the history of the UN. Through an examination of some of the state-building programs that the UN rolled out across the world, from Bolivia to Congo to Somalia, Muschik shows compellingly how the UN has shaped global history through the latter part of the twentieth century.
H-Diplo | Robert Jervis International Security Studies Forum
Roundtable Review 15-27
Eva-Maria Muschik. Building States: The United Nations, Development, and Decolonization, 1945–1965. New York: Columbia University Press, 2022. ISBN: 9780231200257 (paperback, $ 35.00).
5 February 2024 |PDF: https://issforum.org/to/jrt15-27 | Website: rjissf.org | Twitter: @HDiplo
Editor: Diane Labrosse
Commissioning Editors: Elisabeth Roehrlich and Diane Labrosse
Production Editor: Christopher Ball
Pre-Production Copy Editor: Bethany Keenan
Contents
Introduction by Alanna O’Malley, Leiden University. 2
Review by Raphaëlle Khan, The City College of New York-CUNY/ Harvard Asia Center 5
Review by Fabian Klose, University of Cologne. 8
Review by Alden Young, UCLA. 12
Response by Eva-Maria Muschik, University of Vienna. 14
Introduction by Alanna O’Malley, Leiden University
For too long, the histories of the United Nations (UN) and other international organizations were blighted by the misconception that institutional history tended to be rather inward looking and teleological in its treatment of themes and issues, offering few insights on the political functioning of organizations. In more recent years, there has been a renewed interest in this type of history, from Susan Pedersen’s field-changing The Guardians, to Sunil Amrith and Glenda Sluga’s “New Histories of the United Nations” and Amy Sayward’s The United Nations in International History, all of which have all served to explode that perception.[1] Eva-Maria Muschik’s Building States is an outstanding addition to this expanding field that makes several very important contributions to the history of the UN. Through an examination of some of the state-building programs that the UN rolled out across the world, from Bolivia to Congo to Somalia, Muschik shows compellingly how the UN has shaped global history through the latter part of the twentieth century.
What sets this book apart from many others which examine aspects of the UN from one perspective or another is that Muschik begins with a useful definition of what the UN is when she describes it as “more than an intergovernmental forum: namely…an important actor in global history that was substantially shaped by its employees” (6). This sets the book apart from a wider literature which refers to “the UN” as largely meaning only the Western powers.[2] Drawing on a critique of older work which assigns a passive role to the organization, the narrative takes up a provocative position in defining the UN as an actor.[3] This agency, according to Muschik, is clear not just through the politics of decolonization but through the practices of development and state-building programs which arose from those politics. With these sinews, she constructs a persuasive analysis which demonstrates how decolonization was not just a set of rhetorical promises. Through the UN it became a transformative force for millions of people.
Muschik’s book also makes an invaluable contribution with its focus on the people of the UN Secretariat and the ways in which they shaped the work of the organization. She traces, in fascinating detail, how the agency of specific individuals affected development policies in both positive and negative ways. She presents a view of the UN as an intellectual engine of decolonization which both preserved intact old imperial preferences and networks while simultaneously working to transform them into more equitable state policies across the decolonized world. It is important to emphasize that this is not a wholly positive view of the UN; Muschik is attentive to the negative impact of UN officials such as Jean de la Roche in perpetuating imperialist ideas and paternalist practices. The book’s analysis of the Secretariat officials is balanced and nuanced as Muschik explores how personal relationships interacted with institutional politics and geopolitical developments to shape how decolonization progressed.
What is rather absent from the book is the contestation of these practices and politics among the recipients of these programs. Indeed, Muschik acknowledges that “non-Western voices are not as well represented…as one would like them to be.”(6) It is doubtful, too, that the postcolonial leaders who often strongly protested the UN’s state-building efforts and their effects would have viewed their hard-found political sovereignty as being dependent on foreign assistance through the organisation. But in taking a critical view of the UN’s efforts, the book explores some of the contradictions in the UN’s different approaches to sovereignty.
The reviewers agree that the book makes a serious contribution to the field by advancing a set of novel arguments about the UN. As Alden Young rightly notes, the Secretariat’s view of world order as technocratic internationalism led the UN to play a central role in “developing” weaker states, well beyond traditional peacekeeping duties. Fabian Klose’s review is perhaps the most critical in Klose’s argument that one of the weaknesses of the book is the lack of outside perspectives from either the Global South actors to whom the development programs were directed or the great powers who were operating in the background. He also points out that the book does not engage all of the literature on peacekeeping, which, given the entrenchment of the civil mission with the controversial peacekeeping mission that took place there from 1960–1964, is particularly relevant to the chapter on Congo.
The lack of outside perspectives is also something that Raphaëlle Khan picks up on. She notes that there is little in the book on the effects of these development policies on postcolonial states in the long term and the link with what later became termed “fragile states.” This is an interesting point of criticism in light of the case studies that the book covers from Bolivia to Congo to Libya and Somalia, none of which are very strong states today. While Muschik’s narrative does not draw a straight line from the UN’s development programs in these countries to the current situation, this influence should be further explored given the connection and comparable legacies of the impact of the UN in those territories.
In her response, Muschik argues that her book’s focus does not fit a “jurisdictional logic,” but that her interest was in exploring the transition from a world of empires to nation-states, capturing the role of the UN in the process. While her work examines the efforts of one set of actors at the UN, she hopes that it will encourage further studies which will delve into the effects and longer term consequences of their agency.
Overall, this is a book that tackles some of the most difficult aspects of UN history with aplomb, resulting in a study that is nuanced, balanced, and very well argued. Muschik reveals not just the extent and the limits of UN agency but demonstrates how it was employed to both enhance and stultify decolonisation, in the process sharply shaping the postcolonial world order.
Contributors:
Eva-Maria Muschik is a historian and Assistant Professor at the Department of Development Studies at the University of Vienna. Previously, she taught at the University of Bern and at Freie Universität Berlin and held fellowships at the European University Institute in Florence and at Yale University. She completed her PhD in history at New York University in 2016. Her research interests include the history of global governance, development and decolonization, as well as more recently, the North South conflict and the global politics of structural adjustment in the long 1980s.
Alanna O’Malley is Associate Professor of International History at Leiden University. She is a historian of the UN, Congo, Decolonization, and the Cold War. She is Principal Investigator of the project “The Invisible History of the United Nations and the Global South” (INVISIHIST), funded by a Starting Grant from the European Research Council. From 2018–2021 she held the inaugural Special Chair in United Nations Studies in Peace and Justice at Leiden University. She has published in various outlets including Humanity, Journal of Cold War Studies, and International History Review.
Raphaëlle Khan is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the City College of New York-CUNY and an Associate at the Harvard Asia Center. She works at the intersection of History and International Relations, with particular interest in the role of decolonized states in shaping and contesting the world order, decolonization in the twentieth century, and the international politics of South Asia. Her recent publications include “India and Overseas Indians in Ceylon and Burma, 1946–1965: Experiments in Post-imperial Sovereignty” (co-authored with Taylor C. Sherman) in Modern Asian Studies, 65:4 (2022); “Disrupting the Empire and Forging IR: The Role of India’s Early Think Tanks in the Decolonisation Process, 1936–1950s,” in The International History Review 44:4 (2022), and “Sovereignty after Empire and the Search for a New Order: India’s Attempt to Negotiate a Common Citizenship in the Commonwealth (1947-1949),” in The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 49:6 (2021). She has also co-edited the volume titled Theorizing Indian Foreign Policy (Routledge, 2017) and has contributed to Human Rights, Empires, and Their Ends (Cambridge University Press, 2020).
Fabian Klose is Professor of International History and Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Cologne, Germany. His research focuses on the history of decolonization, international humanitarian law, human rights, and humanitarianism in the 19th and 20th centuries. On the history of human rights and humanitarianism he has published Human Rights in the Shadow of Colonial Violence. The Wars of Independence in Kenya and Algeria (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), the edited volume The Emergence of Humanitarian Intervention. Ideas and Practice from the Nineteenth Century to the Present (Cambridge University Press, 2016), and, recently, In the Cause of Humanity. A History of Humanitarian Intervention in the Long Nineteenth Century (Cambridge University Press, 2022). His current research focuses on the international history of the 1990s. He is co-founder of the Cologne Bonn Academy in Exile for refugee academics as well as executive director of the newly founded Cologne Centre for Advanced Studies in International History and Law.
Alden Young is an Associate Professor of African American Studies at UCLA. He teaches class in the International Development Studies Program. He is the author of Transforming Sudan: Decolonization, Economic Development and State Formation (Cambridge University Press, 2017).
Review by Raphaëlle Khan, The City College of New York-CUNY/ Harvard Asia Center
Over the past few years, some of the most stimulating scholarship in Global History and International Relations has come from the unpacking of the transition from a world of empires to a world of nation-states.[4] Building States is one of the finest examples of this new scholarship that compels us to see a space instead of a break and, in doing so, provides fresh insights on the dynamics of the postwar order. The book’s focus is the role of the United Nations (UN) in this transition during the decisive decades of 1945–1965.
To a certain extent, this focus echoes the larger desire among global historians working on decolonization to bring into the limelight actors who have traditionally remained in the background of earlier narratives—generally the agency and thought of actors from the Global South. In these narratives, the UN is usually considered as a backdrop, a political tool, or a place for norm contestation for former colonies.[5] Mark Mazower’s Enchanted Palace, for example, showed how India transformed the empire-friendly UN into an anticolonial forum in 1946.[6] In this context, Muschik’s focus on the UN bureaucracy is a very original one. She starts her inquiry with the same tension as that of Mazower’s book, namely the UN’s ambiguity as “both a creature of empires and of nation-states” (4). However, taking the standpoint of the UN Secretariat allows her to craft another captivating narrative about how, through its officials, the organisation carved a space for its own agency. It did so by navigating between the two antithetical roles inscribed to it: imperial management on the one hand (through trusteeship, the heir of the mandates system), and the principles of self-determination and state sovereignty on the other. The Secretariat “tried to reconcile these two competing projects: the internationalization of empire and the Third World campaign to end colonialism” (4).
The book makes three compelling arguments. First, the UN has been a significant actor that both was “substantially shaped by its employees” and pursued its own agenda (6). Second, the Secretariat significantly shaped development thinking and practice by promoting an idea of state-building as a “technical challenge for international experts rather than a unique political or historical process.” Third, the Secretariat also expanded the role of the UN by “[helping] push international development assistance (…) from an earlier emphasis on advisory services into an increasingly operational direction that focused on getting the job done on behalf of aid recipients” (20). Through this expanded role, the Secretariat significantly contributed to the process of decolonization.
The book is organized around a series of five case studies: Libya, Somaliland, Bolivia, the proposal for an International Administrative Service, and the Congo crisis of 1960–1964. Some cases, like Libya, have been studied very little so far.
Building States breaks new ground in more than one way. It casts a new light on the UN, which it convincingly shows to have been one of the important protagonists of decolonization. Far from being paralyzed by the Cold War, as the mainstream narrative goes, the UN actively provided “technical assistance” to decolonizing and newly decolonized states—a neutral term with, in fact, political implications in practice. The book shows how the UN as a political actor had to navigate between the existing powers of the time, including colonial powers that had not relinquished the idea of shaping the future of the decolonizing world for their own interests. From that perspective, for the UN, “technical assistance,” Muschik contends, “seemed to offer a way of accommodating competing political projects and thus peacefully managing and facilitating decolonization” (4). In this respect, the book devotes substantial attention to the relations of UN officials with member states and their officials. This granular view of multilateral diplomacy offers a fascinating window into the complex relationships of power between different older and newer actors in a world in flux. Beyond the mechanics of diplomacy, Building States retrieves the vision of the world order—“a managerial, technocratic internationalism”—that UN officials developed at a time when other competing ideas emerged in the grey zone of decolonization (19). Last but not least, the book shows that in several cases the UN shaped the form decolonization took, which was not a given internally nor externally. In that sense, it also destabilizes the simple binary between state sovereignty and multilateralism by showing that the UN did not just facilitate cooperation between states but was also a midwife of the nation-state system itself. As Muschik insightfully notes, “the expansion of the activities and powers of international organizations was intimately bound up with the creation of states” (2).
But the story is not simply a history of the UN’s agency in the decolonization process. By examining how the UN became involved, Building States shines a new light on lesser-known processes of state-formation and state-building, their debates, and their challenges. Libya’s case in particular offers the lesser studied account of how the UN had to address the question of how to build a state in only a few years. To a larger extent, the book addresses the conundrum of creating viable states by creating viable national economies and bureaucracies, a task in which the UN engaged. Through the discussions that emerged in the UN in this context, the book demonstrates how limited the sovereignty of some newly independent states turned out to be. In that sense, Muschik rightly notes that “[t]he post-1945 triumph of state sovereignty, then, represents no extension of a European, Westphalian model of international relations to the rest of the world, but a new phenomenon of the postcolonial world, which brought into being a multitude of ‘developmental states’ that depend on foreign personnel and funding in exercising their sovereignty” (2).
Ultimately, Building States depicts how the role of the UN remained ambivalent, caught between the hierarchy of powers with powerful states and competing political projects. David Engerman showed in The Price of Aid that development aid had a political cost within the Cold War rivalry.[7] Here, Muschik decenters the Cold War (although, she argues that the UN’s underlying ideology was more aligned to that of the United States) to highlight the legacies of empire and the role of former colonial powers. Yet, for several reasons, the full cost of UN aid, and its political ramifications, remain unresolved in the book. As states were emerging, UN aid brought up issues of interference in state sovereignty. The tension at the heart of development between responding to the need of states and state sovereignty remained. Muschik also notes that the Secretariat was Western dominated (5), which was not a neutral configuration given how the nationality of individuals works at the level of UN politics. Finally, the conditionality of UN aid echoes other conditionalities ranging from the International Monetary Fund to the EU, while its technical assistance echoes larger debates on neocolonialism. To what extent did the UN walk a fine line between ushering decolonization and being the ally of former colonial powers? What does that say about the meaning of decolonization? Muschik notes that “the tension between foreign tutelage in the name of expertise and the self-determination of sovereign states was continuously renegotiated” (18-19). In that sense too, the supposedly new world proved to have many colonial legacies.
Considering the untapped richness of the UN archives, the book’s rigorous focus is welcome. However, by providing a rich picture of the UN, it leaves one wishing to know more about the wider story. For instance, one can wonder about the countries which received technical aid. Their perspective remains under-explored due to the primary focus of the book and the fact that its sources are mostly UN-based. Similarly, the book does not explore in depth the outcomes and the full effects of UN programs on new states, although those effects are in some cases evoked. Last, one would wish to know more about the link between the fragility of developmental states, which is described so well in the book, and subsequent debates about failed states.
Built on rich archival material, Building States contributes brilliantly to a new scholarship on the end of empire and decolonization.[8] The intellectual reach and implications of this book make it a powerful contribution to larger debates on the process and meaning of decolonization in the twentieth century, including debates on paths not taken and alternative versions of internationalisms, reminding us of the contested nature of the international order.[9] Over the last decade, based on the increased availability of archival sources, we have witnessed a revival of historical accounts of international organizations, in particular the League of Nations.[10] This book contributed to this new literature by bringing in a story that makes visible the role of international organizations in development, by highlighting UN campaigns from poorer countries, the genealogy of assistance during the League of Nations and World War Two, and by focusing on activities “in the field” in the recipient countries, rather than in headquarters (6).[11] In doing so, it adds a crucial dimension to previous development histories that have tended to focus on US foreign policy and the West.[12] The book also contributes to scholarship on state-building and development that focuses on the pre-90s decades.
Building States is a major contribution to the field and provides a valuable background on the agency and stakes of the UN today. It will be of great interest to historians and international relations scholars alike, as well as a larger readership.
Review by Fabian Klose, University of Cologne
In recent years, decolonization has once again become the focus of research within international and global history. Pioneering studies have shed new light on the end of empires in the twentieth century by examining the role of long-neglected yet interrelated issues such as international law, human rights, humanitarianism, and development, in the dissolution of European colonial rule.[13] These approaches all emphasize the importance of looking at the international dimension to explain the rather rapid decolonization process within only two decades after 1945, which led to the emergence of new nation-states in Asia and Africa and thereby fundamentally changed the political landscape of the world.
In this context, Eva-Maria Muschik’s book contributes to this rich research literature by raising the important question of the role of the United Nations in this period of transition from a world of empires to one of nominal nation-states. In Building States: The United Nations, Development, and Decolonization, 1945–1965, based on her PhD dissertation at New York University,[14] she concentrates on the role of the UN Secretariat in supporting the building-up of new nation-states mainly through development assistance in the 1950s and 1960s. For UN officials, the term “development” meant a complex process involving political, economic, social, and educational progress.[15] As the author argues, focusing on the Secretariat—and not merely on UN secretary-generals—makes it possible to deeply analyze the world organization agency in global affairs, as well as its limits.
This does not, however, mean that Muschik’s history is dominated by decisions taken only at the UN headquarters in New York and Geneva; rather, she concentrates on concrete activities of the world organization in four case studies abroad, namely the UN missions in the former Italian colonies of Libya and Somaliland, in Bolivia, and finally in the Congo. Muschik argues that development assistance, specifically in these four cases but also in more general terms, was absolutely crucial for the United Nations, because it provided the organization with the means to actively support the building-up of new nation-states, as well as significantly influencing national policies in the postcolonial world.
She advances three interrelated arguments:
First, the UN should be taken seriously as more than an intergovernmental forum: namely, as an important actor in global history that was substantially shaped by its employees. Second, although Western member states, especially the United States, enjoyed disproportionate influence on the day-to-day work of the organization, the Secretariat was no simple handmaiden of powerful Western nations, but pursued its own agenda. Third, in its attempts to manage decolonization, the UN Secretariat made important contributions to development thinking and practice: it helped shape an understanding of state-building as a universal technical challenge (rather than a unique political or historical process) that required the expertise of myriad specialists in order to succeed. (6-7).
Thus, the book combines an institutional history of the world organization in its early years, along with an analysis of the fundamental issues of international development politics, in order to expand our understanding of the managing role of the UN in the end of empire.
The book is mainly based on UN archival material, including the personal papers of former prominent UN officials, such as Ralph Bunche and David Owen, and documents of the UN archives at New York and Geneva, as well as on published UN official records. In the introduction Muschik acknowledges that in terms of its case studies, the book “does not offer a history of those sites, but rather a history of the United Nations told mainly through its archival trails and the personal papers of key Western UN officials.” (6). She further admits that non-Western voices are not represented in the book as would be desirous, but does not explain why these voices are missing.
This limited methodological approach and the missing diversity of perspectives are especially palpable regarding the four case studies of Libya, Somaliland, Bolivia, and the Congo. There, the reader would often like to learn more about additional perspectives beyond the narrow UN cosmos: What did anti-colonial nationalists in these countries and beyond—to mention only the Bandung states—think about this kind of massive UN interference? Additionally, what was the position of leading colonial powers such as Great Britain and France on this extension of international development policy? To put this into context, these UN interferences happened at an exact moment in time when both Great Britain and France abused the rhetoric of development to defend huge resettlement projects in their late colonial wars in Algeria, Kenya, and Malaya, especially in the realm of debates at the United Nations.[16] Approaching the history of building states almost exclusively through the limited lens of the UN Secretariat implies the risk of leaving other important actors, their perspectives, and their influence out of the bigger picture.
The monograph is organized chronologically in six well-balanced main chapters. The epilogue, which consists of four pages, is rather short and could have been more elaborated, as it only slightly touches some important issues. After a concise introduction, Muschik analyzes in the first chapter the role of the United Nations regarding the colonial world. She starts by briefly looking at Allied wartime planning in regard to the postwar future of European empires, and continues by examining the codification of general principles of colonial rule to all colonies in the UN Charter, namely the Declaration on Non-Self-Governing Territories. Here, her focus lies on the emergence and function of the UN trusteeship system in the 1940s as an oversight mechanism for the world organization. Muschik clearly shows the confines of this UN system and convincingly argues that UN assistance after independence was often far more influential for developing these territories than formal UN trusteeship. In chapters two and three, she moves to her first two case studies of the former Italian colonies of Libya and Somaliland, which she describes as significant early testing ground for UN trusteeship and a kind of laboratory in state-building for the world organization in the 1950s.
As in both cases the role of the United Nations has been largely unexplored, one of the merits of this book is its unfolding of these neglected chapters of UN history. Based on rich empirical research on the records of both UN missions to Tripoli and Mogadishu, Muschik is able to show the significance of the UN experience in Libya and Somaliland. The various development missions, which were initially dispatched to conduct surveys on issues of economy, health, education, and agriculture, caused UN officials to approach state-building now not so much as political process of drafting constitutions, but rather as a technical challenge and an operational activity that international experts and bureaucrats had to solve. As the author argues, both Libya and Somaliland became crucial precedents for the idea of thinking about state-building increasingly in terms of development rather than of political process.
In chapter four, Muschik moves away from the UN trusteeship system and the direct context of decolonization. She focuses on the UN administrative assistance mission to Bolivia in 1949, and raises the question of how this very early mission in Latin America generally influenced the UN thinking about development and state-building. Even though UN assistance in Bolivia did not prove as far-reaching in practice as had been hoped, it nevertheless had a crucial impact. In the Bolivian case, the UN officials pioneered a type of international assistance that went beyond giving advice; they installed international experts directly in the administrative apparatus to manage the inner affairs of a sovereign state. As a consequence, the Bolivian mission became a kind of a new model on how to react to the challenges of nation-building of freshly independent states during global decolonization. The Bolivian experience had significant impact on UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld’s initiative to establish the International Assistance Service in the 1950s, as the author shows in chapter five. This project, which was meant to be a special UN assistance program to serve the special needs of new nation-states emerging from colonial rule, faced severe resistance from various sides against too much international interference and was, accordingly, never fully realized.
In her last chapter, entitled “State-Building Meets Peacekeeping,” the longest chapter in the book, Muschik returns to the African continent and the issue of decolonization. She examines the UN mission in the former Belgian colony of the Congo, known as Opération des Nations Unies au Congo (United Nations Operation in the Congo, or ONUC). After the sudden Belgium colonial withdrawal, causing massive disturbance and civil war in the Congo, the UN Secretariat set up the largest UN assistance program in its history. Muschik argues that “this UN civilian program was a culmination of the (largely unrealized) plans to manage national governments for the sake of development that the world organization had previously introduced in Libya and Bolivia” (200). She vividly demonstrates how Hammarskjöld seized the UN military intervention as an opportunity to launch an autonomous large-scale civilian development operation, and thus significantly expanded the scope of the UN peacekeeping mission beyond its policing function.
Again, the author deeply examines the UN positions and provides a comprehensive survey of the UN civilian activities. Various issues of peacekeeping as well as the broader dimension of humanitarian intervention, however, remain largely undiscussed, and the author does not refer to crucial existing research on both topics. For instance, there are no references to the important work by Norrie MacQueen, who has intensively worked on UN peacekeeping in general and in particular on the special role of ONUC in significantly broadening the concept of UN peace operations.[17] MacQueen shed light on the UN peacekeeping mission in West New Guinea (a case which is just very briefly mentioned on page 253 and in footnote 254 on page 338) by describing the role of the world organization in terms of “UN as interim state” and “UN government.”[18] This lack of engagement with important research in the broader context of humanitarian intervention and humanitarianism is a weakness of the book.
On balance, Muschik presents a detailed picture of the role of the United Nations and its development approach in building states in the era of decolonization. She convincingly argues that we should consider the UN as an important actor with its own agenda in the history of decolonization, one which significantly contributed to development in theory and practice. The book is at its strongest when the author provides a UN perspective based on her rich empirical research of the UN archives. In some chapters, however, the reader would have liked to learn more beyond the pure UN perspectives, and to see more engagement with related fields of humanitarianism and legal debates of humanitarian intervention (two aspects largely missing), because they also shaped the discourse of development far beyond the UN perspective. Despite these critical remarks, the book is an important contribution to the field of the history of international development as well as of the early history of the United Nations.
Review by Alden Young, UCLA
In her 2019 book, Worldmaking After Empire, Adom Getachew argues that Black Sovereignty was born under the auspices of flawed international institutions, wounded by fatal contradictions. Getachew writes that the African members of the League of Nations, Liberia and Ethiopia, both had their juridical sovereignty tempered by the “…persistent claim that slavery was practiced in independent African states that did not have effective control over their territories, humanitarian crisis was tied to black sovereignty.”[19] The independence of all states was not equal either during the interwar period or during the decades of decolonization following the end of the Second World War.
The recognition of “the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line,” and that this problem persisted even after the vast majority of states in Africa and Asia won their juridical sovereignty, has haunted historians and political scientists of Africa, empire, and decolonization over the last decade.[20] In particular, they have begun to ask whether it could have been different. Was a world of 193 states that are recognized as members of the United Nations inevitable?[21] This is of particular importance since most of these states have only a very small voice in world affairs and little control over their own political and economic destiny.
Historiographical interest in the possibility of alternatives reached a crescendo with the publication of Frederick Cooper’s Citizenship between Empire and Nation and Gary Wilder’s Freedom Time in 2014. These two books marked an effort by historians and political theorists of empire to take seriously the contention that the sovereign nation-state was not the sole endpoint of anticolonial nationalism.[22] Instead, from 1945–1965 many different visions of the end of empire competed furiously with one another. The story of how we got to a world of sovereign states has to be complicated. Gregory Mann has shown this convincingly, arguing that just as African states won independence across the Sahel, the citizens of those new states began calling for interventions from non-governmental organizations for aid and development.[23]
Yet the mechanism through which the international community in the decades after the Second World War came to understand that some states would require ongoing and consistent intervention has remained shrouded in mystery. It is this mystery that Eva-Maria Muschik expertly addresses in her wonderful new book, Building States. She argues that “the expansion of the activities and powers of international organizations was intimately bound up with the creation of states, the construction of state power, and the very constitution of modern statehood in the postwar period” (2). Muschik persuasively argues that the postwar state was not a “modular copy” of the earlier Westphalian state, to borrow a term from the political scientist Benedict Anderson.[24] Rather, Muschik argues we see the emergence of “developmental states,” that indefinitely relied on “foreign personnel and funding in exercising their sovereignty” (2). She does this in a very innovative manner: Muschik takes seriously the UN Secretariat in New York. She uses the Secretariat’s ambition, “to build a supposedly neutral bridge from an imperial past and present to an international future,” to shift our commonly told stories of the Cold War, decolonization, and the enterprise of development (11). She explores this story using an array of frequently neglected archival sources, often hiding in plain sight, such as the United Nations Career Records Project (UNCRP) in the Bodleian Library at Oxford University and the Ralph Bunche papers in the Charles E. Young library at UCLA, as well as the extensive archives of the United Nations itself in New York and Geneva. Her use of the UN personnel files and other personal papers is excellent. These papers allow her to provide exquisite thumbnail portraits throughout the text of the small but incredibly cosmopolitan staff of the Secretariat, ranging from the justly famous African American Ralph Bunche to his Chinese boss, Victor Hoo.
Muschik’s book does more than remind us of the central role of UN Secretariat in reimagining sovereignty during the middle of the twentieth century. It also provides excellent case studies of the role of the UN in making national independence a universal ideal. In order to do this, Muschik crafts impressive case studies of Libya, Somaliland, and the Congo. Each of these chapters should be read by historians of decolonization and political scientists of “fragile states” for the central role that international organizations have played in the creation of what after the Cold War frequently have been dismissed as “failed states.” Muschik shows that there was no “coming anarchy.”[25] Instead, the vulnerabilities that so often frustrate international commentators today were always built into the Secretariat’s “vision of world order—a managerial, technocratic internationalism” (19). The UN’s mission in the Congo from 1960–1964 appeared to be based upon showing the limits of the principles of “non-interference” in conjunction with “a managerial, technocratic internationalism” (19). The UN’s involvement in the Congo appeared to continuously grow, as “peacekeeping in the context of decolonization meant not just a policing function for UN troops, but the maintenance and reorganization of health, education, agriculture, finances, judicature, and other state services” (248). Development became the task and mechanism of UN involvement, but this task meant taking on a direct operational role. The UN and the field of international development began to take on the vital, day-to-day tasks of state-making and governance. At the end of Muschik’s fabulous book it becomes clear that a technocratic secretariat that hopes to act in the name of humanity or the planet can never become effective in the face of escalating great-power tensions. This should serve as a warning to us all as we face global or planetary problems like climate change even as we appear to be on the verge of a new Cold War.
Response by Eva-Maria Muschik, University of Vienna
I would like to thank Diane Labrosse for editing the roundtable, Elisabeth Roehrlich for commissioning it, Alanna O’Malley for writing an introduction, and most of all, Raphaëlle Khan, Fabian Klose, and Alden Young for their critical engagement and kind words with regard to my book.
I very much appreciate the reviewers’ deft summaries of my book’s arguments and scholarly contributions. All seem to agree with my interpretations and the central claim about the important role that the United Nations (UN) and, more specifically, UN personnel played in shaping the highly unequal, interdependent postcolonial order of sovereign nation-states that we inhabit today.
This order features many “developmental states”, which rely in various ways on the managerial, technocratic internationalism promoted by UN staff and the expansion of the activities and powers of international organizations and non-governmental organizations more generally.[26] In that sense, as Young points out, so-called fragile or failed states are not a post-Cold War phenomenon (as a Google Ngram search might suggest), but are instead rooted in the specifics of mid-twentieth century decolonization.[27]
The book calls attention to the “international dimension” of the complex postwar transition from a world of empire to a world of nation-states, in looking more closely at “the mystery,” as Young puts it, of how exactly UN personnel contributed to it. They did so by shaping international debates about trusteeship, self-determination, and development in New York, but also by shaping developmental practices in member countries as well as those aspiring to independence and UN membership.
Which brings me to the question, which the reviewers all raise in one way or another, of why I wrote this particular book and not a different one (focused, for example, on those who were on the “recipient end” of UN interventions).
What sparked my initial interest in UN development history as I did my academic training in European History at New York University in the 2010s was research that shed light on the problematic imperial roots of “global governance” and “international development” but stopped short of closely examining the post-1945 contestation of that legacy.[28]
Having the archives of the UN Secretariat more or less right on my doorstep seemed to offer one way, (which was also compatible with my care responsibilities at the time), to examine that postwar history and also to anchor or “localize” global history in a specific time and place.[29] This approach necessarily foregrounds the perspective of UN personnel, which was dominated—if not exclusively—by North American and European nationals in the 1950s and 1960s.[30] My following of their interests and postings at the time resulted in the rather odd geography of the book that doesn’t quite fit any area studies “jurisdictional logic.”[31]
I thought there was value in critically reexamining this supposedly independent, “international” Euro-American UN staff, especially in light of one relatively recent study’s dubious claim that there was “a certain logic” to the fact that the most important recruitment source for UN development experts were the (former) colonial services. Most colonial civil servants had proved their adaptability to local conditions, and many had developed a kind of sympathetic understanding of the cultural backgrounds and specific needs of the countries concerned, so the book argues.[32] While continuities in personnel might lead us to conclude that a straightforward “recycling of empire” took place through the UN (as Veronique Dimier has argued with a view to the European aid bureaucracy), [33] the picture that emerged for me from the archives was more complicated. The North American and European nationals on whom the book largely focuses had differing backgrounds and outlooks, and therefore also differing ideas about development and decolonization. They also did not necessarily get their way in terms of programs and processes they envisioned.
While the main protagonists of the book hailed from North America and Europe, “non-Western voices” are not completely absent in this story, as Klose suggests. See, for example, my discussion of Chinese diplomat Victor Hoo’s thoughts on trusteeship, Egyptian delegate Selim Bey’s remarks about Libya, the anonymous Somalian Corriere della Somalia author, Bolivian opposition leader Hernán Siles Zuazo, the various “Global South”[34] UN delegates in chapter 5, or Congolese statesmen like Antoine Gizenga and Thomas Kanza. Similarly, although it is not the main focus of the book, we do learn some things about the position of colonial powers such as Great Britain and France from the UN paper trail, for example their hostile initial stance towards UN “interference” in Libya and subsequent warming to world organizations’ representatives as useful allies. That said, there is certainly room for further scholarship on both topics.[35]
I am well aware of and explicitly address the limitations of my approach and wholeheartedly share the reviewers’ wish to learn more, above all, as Khan highlights, about the perspectives of the “recipients” on UN interventions and the effects of the UN engagement on the countries and societies in question (and vice versa). My sincere hope is that other scholars, with different language and travel abilities as well as disciplinary training or scholarly interests, can build on my book and use the largely neglected archival materials it calls attention to, to foreground Global South perspectives, both from within and outside of the UN.
The argument that postcolonial African archives, for example, are too disorganized, or ill-kept to be of value for researchers (what Nana Osei-Opare calls “postcolonial African archival pessimism”) is certainly misleading.[36] Yet, in the recent past, there have been real challenges to conducting archival research in certain places, including Libya, Somalia, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, with implications for which countries will receive more attention from historians than others. I hope that the book might move others to use the materials collected in the archives of international organizations—not just of the ones of the UN secretariat—as an additional set of sources in order to write histories with a very different focus from the one that I chose for my book.
At the same time, there is still much more to be learned about the postwar transition from empire to nation-state, as scholars have begun to push back against the notion of a simple extension of a “Westphalian system” of nominal nation-based sovereignty from Europe to the rest of the globe.[37] Is it indeed helpful to contrast the two orders to the extent that we do?[38] To what extent did (European) interwar experiments and innovations with regard to sovereignty and international organizations set a precedent for postwar decolonization or not?[39] Precisely what kind of sovereignties were produced by decolonization? And finally: What roles did international organizations play in that process?[40]
[1] Susan Pedersen, The Guardians: The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017); Sunil Amrith and Glenda Sluga, “New Histories of the United Nations,” Journal of World History, 19: 3 (2008): 251-274, DOI: https://www.jstor.org/stable/40542615 ; Amy Sayward, The United Nations in International History (London: Bloomsbury, 2017).
[2] See for example, Mark Mazower, No Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013); Mark Mazower, Governing the World: The History of an Idea, 1815 to the Present (New York: Penguin, 2013); Paul Kennedy, The Parliament of Man: The Past, Present, and Future of the United Nations (New York: Vintage Books, 2007).
[3] On the role of the UN as an actor see: Alanna O’Malley, The Diplomacy of Decolonisation: America, Britain and the United Nations during the Congo crisis 1960–64 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018) 12-17; Oran R. Young, The United Nations and the International System, International Organization, 22: 4 (1968): 902-922, DOI: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2705849 .
[4] For a discussion on this, see Pallavi Raghavan, Martin J. Bayly, Elisabeth Leake, and Avinash Paliwal, “The Limits of Decolonisation in India’s International Thought and Practice: An Introduction,”, International History Review 44:4 (2022):1-7, and the contributions to this special section.
[5] Among other examples, see Manu Baghavan, The Peacemakers: India and the Quest for One World (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); Adom Getachew, Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019); Raphaëlle Khan, “Between Ambitions and Caution: India, Human Rights and Self-Determination at the United Nations,” in Roland Burke, Marco Duranti, and A. Dirk Moses, eds., Decolonization, Self-Determination, and the Birth of Global Human Rights Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020); Alanna O’Malley, “India, Apartheid and the New World Order at the UN, 1946–1962,” Journal of World History 31:1 (2020): 195-223.
[6] Mark Mazower, No Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), chapter 4.
[7] David C. Engerman, The Price of Aid: The Economic Cold War in India (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018).
[8] See the works cited throughout this review.
[9] On aborted visions of decolonization and paths not taken, see for instance: Frederick Cooper, Citizenship between Empire and Nation: Remaking France and French Africa, 1945–1960 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014); Gary Wilder, Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015). On internationalisms, see for instance: Michele Louro, Comrades against Imperialism: Nehru, India and Interwar Internationalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018); Glenda Sluga, Internationalism in the Age of Nationalism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013); Glenda Sluga and Patricia Clavin, eds., Internationalisms: A Twentieth-Century History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016); Manu Goswami, “Imaginary Futures and Colonial Internationalisms,” The American Historical Review 117:5 (2012): 1461-1485.
[10] See for instance Susan Pedersen, The Guardians: The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015).
[11] For a different perspective on international organizations and development, see also Marc Frey, Sönke Kunkel, and Corinna R. Unger, eds., International Organisations and Development, 1945–1990 (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).
[12] With important exceptions, such Corinna R. Unger, Nicholas Fern, Jack Loveridge, and Iris Borowy (eds.), Perspectives on the History of Global Development (Berlin; Boston: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2022) and Corinna R. Unger, International Development: A Postwar History (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018). For a discussion on the field, see Marc Frey and Sönke Kunkel, “Writing the History of Development: A review of the Recent Literature,” Contemporary European History 20:2 (2011): 215-232.
[13]See for instance: Jan Eckel, “Human Rights and Decolonization: New Perspectives and Open
Questions,” Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development 1:1 (2010): 111-135; Daniel Maul, Human Rights, Development and Decolonization. The International Labour Organization, 1940–70 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); Young-Sun Hong, Cold War Germany, the Third World, and the Global Humanitarian Regime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015); Steven Jensen, The Making of International Human Rights: The 1960s, Decolonization, and the Reconstruction of Global Values (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017); Andrew S. Thompson, “Unravelling the Relationships between Humanitarianism, Human Rights, and Decolonization: Time for a Radical Rethink?” in Martin Thomas and Andrew S. Thompson, eds., The Oxford Handbook of the Ends of Empire (Oxford; Oxford University Press, 2017): 453-476.
[14] Eva-Maria Muschik, Building States through International Development Assistance: The United Nations between Trusteeship and Self-Determination, 1945 to 1965, PhD Diss. (New York University, 2017).
[15] For recent research on the history of development, see especially Corinna Unger, Iris Borowy, and Corinne A. Pernet, The Routledge Handbook on the History of Development (London/New York: Routledge, 2022).
[16] In the French context, for instance, the Dossier de Défense contre les attaques anti-coloniales of the French Foreign Office offers intriguing insights in this French strategy at the United Nations. The archive reference of these documents is Archives Diplomatiques (France), series “Nations Unies et Organisations Internationale,” Carton 537.
[17] See Norrie MacQueen, Humanitarian Intervention and the United Nations (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011); MacQueen, The United Nations, Peace Operations and the Cold War, (London/New York: Routledge, 2011); MacQueen, “Cold War Peacekeeping versus Humanitarian Intervention. Beyond the Hammarskjöldian Model” in Fabian Klose ed., The Emergence of Humanitarian Intervention. Ideas and Practice from the Nineteenth Century to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016): 231-252.
[18] MacQueen, Peacekeeping and the International System (London/New York: Routledge, 2006): 107-109.
[19] Adom Getachew, Worldmaking After Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019), 59.
[20] W. E. B. Du Bois, “To the Nations of the World,” (1900): https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/1900-w-e-b-du-bois-nations-world/.
[21] United Nations “About Us,”: https://www.un.org/en/about-us#:~:text=The%20UN’s%20Membership%20has%20grown,members%20of%20the%20General%20Assembly.
[22] Frederick Cooper, Citizenship between Empire and Nation: Remaking France and French Africa, 1945-1960 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014) and Gary Wilder, Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015).
[23] Gregory Mann, From Empires to NGOs in the West African Sahel: The Road to Nongovernmentality (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2015).
[24] Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (New York, NY: Verso, 1983).
[25] Robert Kaplan, The Coming Anarchy: Shattering the Dreams of the Post Cold War (New York, NY: Random House, 2000).
[26] I want to stress here that the terrific quotation that both Khan and Young single out, which points out that “the expansion of the activities and powers of international organizations was intimately bound up with the creation of states” in the twentieth century is not mine, but Guy Fiti Sinclair’s: Guy Fiti Sinclair, To Reform the World: International Organizations and the Making of Modern States (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 22.
[27] Interestingly, talk of “weak states” seems to follow a somewhat different timeline: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=%22weak+states%22&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=en-2019&smoothing=3.
[28] Joseph Hodge, Triumph of the Expert: Agrarian Doctrines of Development and the Legacies of British Colonialism (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2007); Susan Pedersen, “Back to the League of Nations,” The American Historical Review 112:4 (October 2007), 1091-1117; Mark Mazower, No Enchanted Palace : The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009); Frederick Cooper, “Writing the History of Development,” Journal of Modern European History 8, no. 1 (2010): 5–23.
[29] For a discussion of the need to critically examine the specific “locality” of global history, see Daniel Speich Chassé, “Der Blick von Lake Success: Das Entwicklungsdenken Der Frühen UNO Als ‘Lokales Wissen,’” in Entwicklungswelten—Globalgeschichte Der Entwicklungszusammenarbeit, ed. Hubertus Büschel and Daniel Speich Chassé, vol. 6, Globalgeschichte (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2009), 143-74.
[30] There is interesting work (in progress) on UN staff more generally (Dexter Fergie’s dissertation “‘Headquartering the World’: American Power and the Space of Global Governance, 1945-1980” at Northwestern University), on leading “non-Western” UN officials (via an ongoing book project on U-Thant by Thant Myint-U and writings on Rajeshwar Dayal by Swpana Kona Nayudu), as well as on Soviet staff in the UN system in Louis H. Porter’s terrific University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill dissertation “Cold War Internationalisms: The USSR in UNESCO, 1945-1967” (now a book project Reds in Blue: The Soviet Encounter with International Organizations).
[31] On the potential dangers of moving beyond one’s scholarly “jurisdiction,” see Quinn Slobodian, “Jurisdiction Leap, Political Drain, and Other Dangers of Transnational History,” New Global Studies 4:1 (2010), https://doi.org/10.2202/1940-0004.1104.
[32] Craig Murphy, The United Nations Development Programme : A Better Way? (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 77.
[33] Véronique Dimier, The Invention of a European Development Aid Bureaucracy: Recycling Empire (London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2014).
[34] Although conscious of the limitations of this umbrella term, I use it here as a stand-in for the “Group of 77”—a caucus of self-described “developing countries” officially formed at UN in 1964. https://www.g77.org/doc/.
[35] Amy Limoncelli, “Great Britain and International Administration: Finding a New Role at the United Nations, 1941-1975,” PhD Diss. (Boston College, 2016); Amy Limoncelli, “Remaking the International Civil Service: The Legacies of British Internationalism in the United Nations Secretariat, 1945–7,” Twentieth Century British History 34:2 (June 1, 2023): 169–191, https://doi.org/10.1093/tcbh/hwac029; Jessica Pearson, “Defending Empire at the United Nations: The Politics of International Colonial Oversight in the Era of Decolonisation,” The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 45:3 (2017): 525-549; Jessica L. Pearson, The Colonial Politics of Global Health: France and the United Nations in Postwar Africa (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018); Pearson, “The French Empire Goes to San Francisco: The Founding of the United Nations and the Limits of Colonial Reform,” French Politics, Culture and Society 38:2 (2020): 35-55; Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo and José Pedro Monteiro, eds., The Pasts of the Present: Internationalism, Imperialism and the Formation of the Contemporary World (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017); Nicole Eggers, Jessica L. Pearson, and Aurora Almada e Santos, eds., The United Nations and Decolonization (New York: Routledge, 2020). For research on Global South perspectives on and in the UN see work associated with Alanna O’Malley’s ERC Project “The Invisible History of the United Nations and the Global South,” https://www.universiteitleiden.nl/en/research/research-projects/humanities/the-invisible-history-of-the-united-nations-and-the-global-south-invisihist#tab-1 .
[36] Nana Osei-Opare, “‘If You Trouble a Hungry Snake, You Will Force It to Bite You.’ Rethinking Postcolonial African Archival Pessimism, Worker Discontent, and Petition Writing in Ghana, 1957-66 ,” Journal of African History 62:1 (2021): 59–78, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853721000165.
[37] Most clearly and famously articulated perhaps in Adom Getachew, Worldmaking After Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019).
[38] Peter Judson raised this question in a recent keynote at the University of Vienna “Habsburg Central Europe‘s Post-War Imperial Order,” (22 June 2023), https://dshcs.univie.ac.at/aktivitaeten-events/internationale-konferenzen-und-workshops/2nd-annual-workshop-of-the-late-habsburg-phd-network/.
[39] Jamie Martin, The Meddlers: Sovereignty, Empire, and the Birth of Global Economic Governance (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2022); Natasha Wheatley, The Life and Death of States: Central Europe and the Transformation of Modern Sovereignty (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2023).
[40] For a fuller discussion of possible future research avenues see Eva-Maria Muschik, “Special Issue Introduction: Towards a Global History of International Organizations and Decolonization,” Journal of Global History 17, no. 2 (2022): 173–90, https://doi.org/10.1017/S1740022822000043.