Written by Hector Le Luel
What comes after empire? From a contemporary perspective, the answer to such a question seems evident: independence, through peaceful or violent means, and the construction of individual nation-states as the logical result of hard-won liberation struggles. In Africa, the decolonisation of Algeria, Angola and Congo seem to confirm this paradigm that has become entrenched in our understandings of late colonial history. In the 1940s and 50s, however, politicians and intellectuals across French Africa were pursuing a vastly different goal, made a possibility by the seismic effects of the Second World War and the entrenched connections of empire: the creation of a federal entity, tying together the metropole and its African overseas territories in a supranational system of equal governance.
The idea of federalism gained ground in the period immediately following the liberation of France in 1944 and the establishment of a Constituent Assembly, charged with drafting the new political landscape of France. Within this assembly, voices from the country’s colonies – that contributed massively to the war effort by rallying men, labour and funds for Charles De Gaulle’s free army – were making themselves heard. Members of parliament, such as Senegal’s Léopold Sédar Senghor and Martinique’s Aimé Césaire, were bringing to attention demands for reform that questioned the foundations of colonial rule. These requests were simple: the extension of French citizenship to all people of the Empire, and the creation of a representative body representing all territories under French rule. For Senghor, this new body would form the skeleton of a three-layered structure: representatives would be elected for each overseas territory, who in turn would sit in an assembly of colonial nations, represented in an imperial assembly in France on the same footing as metropolitan parliamentarians.
Such demands, that would require a complete redefinition of the concept of empire and colonial power relations, were made possible by a combination of factors that merged in this post-1945 ‘moment’. The French model of governance had, first of all, already created a template for imperial, transnational citizenship: since 1916, the inhabitants of Senegal’s Quatre Communes, the four populous urban centres along its coast, had gained access to full citizenship whilst retaining customary rights. The French policy of ‘assimilation’ had also created a phenomenon of cultural hybridity that had impacted the worldviews of young, upper-class Africans such as Senghor and Césaire. Educated in Paris, both men defined their identities in opposition to strict racial and national definitions: they were Black and French, African and European, globalised citizens in an increasingly globalised world. These ideas were the cornerstone of the Négritude artistic movement that they endorsed and fuelled their political ideals that were platformed at the highest levels of the state from 1944. Finally, the context of the war, and metropolitan France’s humiliating defeat and ensuing collaboration with Nazi Germany, had created an opening for new ideas to question the supremacy of France within its Empire. The emerging Cold War, and the eruption of anticolonial movements in Indochina and Algeria, would push France to imagine an arrangement that would rebuild its power on the world stage through consensus.
Overseas deputies, backed by many ‘metropolitan’ colleagues on the left, organised their rhetoric around these new historical contingencies. In speeches made to the Constituent Assembly, they pointed to the benefits of federalism as a system adapted to a changing world order that would reassure even die-hard colonialists – in Senghor’s words, “this system would only reinforce [empire] since it would be founded on the consent and love of liberated men”, like an orchestra that would “allow the smallest African flute to play its role”. Debates raged on until a draft was finally accepted in April 1946, celebrated as a decisive victory by the left. It declared that “France constitutes, with its overseas territories, on the one hand, and the associated states, on the other, a Union of freely consenting parties.”. Citizenship would be extended to all peoples of overseas France and would grant them universal voting rights for the National Assembly. The victory would however be short-lived: put up for referendum in May, it was rejected by voters, primarily due to the proposal of a unicameral system and the abolition of the Senate in the new constitution. A revised text, accepted by a new referendum in October 1946, crushed the hopes of federalists, as it cemented unequal citizenship rights between metropolitan and overseas French and established a global ‘Assembly of the Union’ that would only have advisory powers to the centres of governance in Paris. In a context of growing violence in Indochina and the undoing of the Communist majority in parliament, a cautious, conservative approach to empire was favoured against the radical proposals of overseas representatives.
The new entity created in 1946, the French Union, was thus a far cry from the federal structure envisioned by deputies such as Senghor, Césaire, and Côte d’Ivoire’s Félix Houphouët-Boigny. It confirmed the continued supremacy of France as a metropolitan entity governing over its colonial possessions, albeit with extended participation and citizenship rights. Nevertheless, deputies continued to fight throughout the late 1940s and 50s to bring their ideas to fruition. Senghor and Houphouët-Boigny refined their respective visions of federalism, the former proposing the creation of a strong African federation that would serve as an equal interlocutor with metropolitan France, whilst the latter pushed for the creation of a federation where each territory would be directly represented in a network of states. These lofty ideas of political construction must not be seen as simply abstract exercises: West African leaders were conscious of the real-world promises of sacrificing hopes of national independence in exchange for continued collaboration with France. The access to the welfare state provisions put in place in France after the war was an extremely attractive offer that would boost Africa economically. Moreover, the ongoing talks regarding European construction directly concerned overseas France. By staying firmly attached to the continent, territories such as Senegal, Mali or Côte d’Ivoire would be tied into the nascent European common market, effectively creating a Eurafrican Union.
This idea of Eurafrica as a debated, envisioned, but ultimately failed dream is a central part of Frederick Cooper’s argument defended in several works. Cooper relies on countless sources and speeches to show how close these aspirations came to being realised, echoing the 1946 debates concerning the reform of the French Republic. His studies are part of a growing body of scholarship on this idea of federalism as an alternative path to nationalism in the rethinking of post-war colonialism. Gary Wilder equally investigates what he sees as the ‘radical vision’ of Senghor, Césaire and others that would have transformed modern understandings of the nation-state by making use of the connections created by the violent and tragic history of colonialism. What these works, full of poetics of hope, however, fail to address, is the pragmatic realities of the Cold War and late imperial France that ultimately crushed any aspirations for equal federal governance. In a scathing response to both scholars, Samuel Moyn underlines the historical impossibilities facing this ‘utopian’ federal system: he points to the costs it would have entailed, costs that France and its rebuilding European partners were simply not ready to shoulder. Richard Drayton similarly underlines the change of strategy of the old imperial powers in the 1950s, gradually cutting off overseas territories from the centre whilst keeping favourable commercial arrangements. The permeating culture of structural racism that relegated colonial subjects to second-class citizens at best must also be highlighted, making the implementation of egalitarian governance at odds with the hegemonic culture of the time.
The ideas expressed in the critical period between 1944 and formal independences in 1960 must however be appreciated as radical approaches to postcolonialism. Critics of Senghor, Césaire and Houphouët-Boigny have branded them as Francophile ‘colonised intellectuals’ – to quote Frantz Fanon – that betrayed the cause of nationalist fights for independence. Of course, the idealist parliamentarians representing overseas France were members of a select minority – educated, upper-class and ambitious men crossing the frontiers of colony and metropole. Their ideas, however, must be evaluated in parallel to the fights for nationalism as politics of hope that were seeking to transcend colonialism – one within the existing framework, the other one outside of it. Moreover, their scepticism of independent national states as units adapted to the modern world foreshadowed the future of many African countries in the late 20th century. Playing off unequal bilateral relations and the need for investment of its old colonies, subsequent French governments and private companies exploited the continent’s vast resources in a ‘Françafrique’ system oiled with corruption and military protection for friendly leaders – amongst them Senghor and Houphouët-Boigny, profiting off a system they had decried yet now pragmatically embraced. The idea of federation, as ambitious and imperfect as it was, may have provided an alternative that could have prevented the continuation of colonial logics of power and exploitation. It is in this hypothetical sense that it must be analysed, and it is in this sense that the history retracing its tumultuous path must be appreciated.
Bibliography
Wilder, Gary. Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World. Durham: Duke University Press, 2015.
Cooper, Frederick. Citizenship Between Empire and Nation: Remaking France and French Africa, 1945-1960. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014.
Burbank, Jane, and Frederick Cooper. Post-Imperial Possibilities : Eurasia, Eurafrica, Afroasia. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2023.
Moyn, Samuel. ‘Fantasies of Federalism’. Dissent, 62 no.1 (2015), p. 145-151.
Drayton, Richard. ‘Federal utopias and the realities of imperial power’. Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 37 no.2 (2017), 401-406.
Featured Image Credit: Meeting of governors at the Museum of the Colonies in Paris via Wiki Commons.
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