Decolonisation and Regionalism

Changing space has long been central to projects of decolonisation. For Kwame Nkrumah, the first president of Ghana, national independence was only the beginning: overcoming the divide-and-rule of colonial partition meant regional integration on a continental scale.

Nkrumah’s dreams were frustrated in his lifetime. But from Africa to Latin America to Southeast Asia, regional solidarity still holds the promise of prosperity, peace, and the strength to resist neocolonial dependence on the United States, Europe or China.

Decolonisation and regionalism have a complicated history, however. Integration was also a priority for Europe at the end of empire, for quite different reasons. “Would it not be a success if we could realise the dream of Eurafrica?” asked Paul-Henri Spaak in 1957. He saw this future in the Treaty of Rome, with EEC affiliation for colonial possessions – regionalism as an alternative to decolonisation, not as a means to achieve it.

But decolonisation is not just about political arrangements. In decolonial thought, it is about knowledge, power, and the material consequences of domination and dispossession. Regionalism is such a body of knowledge. It shapes what regions are, how they function, and what they should be.

The conventional place to start is Eurocentrism: the European Union (EU) is not the model for the world. Amitav Acharya, for instance, argues that the thinking of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) on consensus and national sovereignty is more influential than that of the EU. Comparison, however, may still be valid: the great Nigerian historian Anthony Asiwaju has long urged the comparative study of the African Union and the EU, not to measure one against the other but to build a better future for both. It is Europe’s false centrality that matters.

But there are more fundamental questions to face. For one, “region” is a dangerous word. When set against the divisions of national borders, it is self-justifying: it speaks of naturalness, neutrality. It is a good space, the right space, no matter who looks at it or where it comes from.

Colonial ideas of race, civilisation and the orientation of power underpin the conception of continents and world regions: elevating Europe, inventing Africa and creating the Middle East. This makes it something to distrust. Looking at a map, it is hard to miss the colonial heritage of borders. But it is easy to forget the colonial demarcation of other spaces. Imperial languages and infrastructures shape “natural” spaces of cooperation, from East Africa to the Caribbean. And as Edward Said and Valentin-Yves Mudimbe explored, colonial ideas of race, civilisation and the orientation of power underpin the conception of continents and world regions: elevating Europe, inventing Africa and creating the Middle East.

What happens when we denaturalise regions inherited from imperial thinking? The Kenyan scholar Ali Mazrui argued for the “abolition” of the Red Sea. He looked to restore the historic continuities of an “Afrabian” space that was denied by European racial categories. Such spaces have their own historical tensions to confront. But new solidarities could be built on older, suppressed commonalities.

This is about the meaning of space, not just names or boundaries. Nkrumah’s Pan-African dream was not invalid because it accepted the European outline of the continent. “Once the indigenous conquered peoples of the continent choose to retain the term ‛Africa’”, writes South African philosopher Mogobe Ramose, “then they are entitled to give content and meaning to it.”

Is regionalism just a reshuffle of imperial structures, or an opportunity for revolution? Questions of meaning hinge on the nature of power within and without these spaces. This is where the decolonisation of regionalism as knowledge passes onto practice. Can a region such as Europe “manage” its borders without eroding its neighbours’ sovereignty? Can regions built around the hegemony of Germany or South Africa escape internal dynamics of dispossession? Can historically marginalised nations like Haiti or Burundi act as equals alongside their regional partners?

The problem gets deeper when we think about relationships with people rather than between states. Who is regionalism for? Can it restore land to the dispossessed, security to the displaced? To Frantz Fanon (a great believer in the nation), any successor to empire defined by the interests of a national bourgeoisie was a reformulation of colonial domination and dispossession. Is regionalism just a reshuffle of imperial structures, or an opportunity for revolution?

Decolonising regionalism, in any case, goes beyond redrawing the map, or decentring Europe. It is a critical, radical, all-encompassing reformation of the oldest questions: who benefits, who pays, and whose ideas matter.

Walter Mignolo offers “border thinking” as the means for moving beyond Eurocentrism and reactionary nativism in decolonial thought. This means thinking from the borders of territory, knowledge and power, instead of standing in the old centres and studying – looking at, thinking about, doing something for or to – the old margins. Where ideas come from matters. This is a starting point, not an answer.

Perhaps, then, regionalism must be liberated from the grip of conventional economic, political and historical thinking, of the rational actor and the nation-state. In place of trade, imperial heritage or security, can regionalisms emerge from relationships between people and animals, express the true universals of climate crisis or define experiences of space that depart entirely from the premise of territory?

“We are the children of geography and history”, notes Ethiopian philosopher Teodros Kiros, “born to a given race, a given region, at a particular time, in a particular place.” None of these meanings are singular or fixed – not ourselves, our regions, our races, our histories. But all are entangled. Redefining one means redefining the rest. The place where we stand changes the spaces we see around us.