Revisiting the Federalists in the Black Atlantic

This chapter recovers the largely forgotten projects of regional federation in the West Indies and Africa that anticolonial nationalists pursued alongside their reinvention of self-determination. In returning to the centrality of the federal imaginary to anticolonial nationalists, the chapter demonstrates that alternatives to the nation-state persisted at the height of decolonization. For federalists like Kwame Nkrumah and Eric Williams, freedom from alien rule did not sufficiently guarantee nondomination as powerful states, international organizations, and private actors exploited relations of economic dependence to indirectly secure political compulsion. The chapter reconstructs how Nkrumah and Williams positioned the United States as a model of postcolonial federation to make the case that regional federations could overcome the postcolonial predicament by creating larger, more diverse domestic markets, organizing collective development plans, ensuring regional redistribution, and providing for regional security. It also traces the ways that this model of regional federation gave way to forms of functional integration that bolstered the nation-state as critics rejected Nkrumah's and Williams's proposals for centralized federal states.