Joseph R. Slaughter (editor) - The Global South Atlantic

THE GLOBAL SOUTH ATLANTIC

KERRY BYSTROM and JOSEPH R. SLAUGHTER

Editors

FORDHAM UNIVERSITY PRESS

New York 2018

Copyright 2018 Fordham University Press

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be

reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in

any form or by any meanselectronic, mechanical,

photocopy, recording, or any otherexcept for brief

quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission

of the publisher.

Fordham University Press has no responsibility for the

persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party

Internet websites referred to in this publication and does not

guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will

remain, accurate or appropriate.

Fordham University Press also publishes its books in a

variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in

print may not be available in electronic books.

Visit us online at www.fordhampress.com.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

available online at https://catalog.loc.gov.

JOSEPH R. SLAUGHTER AND KERRY BYSTROM

LUIZ FELIPE DE ALENCASTRO

JAIME HANNEKEN

JASON FRYDMAN

ISABEL HOFMEYR

ANNE GARLAND MAHLER

KERRY BYSTROM

OSCAR HEMER

CHRISTINA E. CIVANTOS

MAGAL ARMILLAS-TISEYRA

LANIE MILLAR

LUS MADUREIRA

MAJA HORN

WAL S. HASSAN

Joseph R. Slaughter and Kerry Bystrom

When Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt made their Joint Declaration of hopes for a better future of the world from a warship off the coast of Newfoundland on August 14, 1941, they were not thinking about the South Atlantic. They were anticipating a formal North Atlantic Anglo-American military alliance against German aggression and looking forward to a postwar peace that might, in the Charters words, afford assurance that all the men in all the lands may live out their lives in freedom from fear and want, based on principles of sovereign rights and self government and the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live.for the Declaration by United Nations that expanded its scope beyond the North Atlantic and laid the legal foundations for the later Charter of the United Nations in 1945. However, despite its promises and lofty principles for a New World Order (as many then described it), the first effect of the Atlantic Charter was to fortify the Anglo-American alliance between the old and new empires, and it ultimately secured the Anglophone North Atlantic hegemony to come.

Yet, while Roosevelt and Churchill may not have had the South Atlantic or other oceans in mind when they issued their statement to the world, many people living in the shadows of empire were already thinking about these North Atlantic promises and oceanic expectation[s] of national self-determination (Grovogui 1996, 146). Seeming to have application to all the peoples of the world, as the British West Indian anti-imperialist George Padmore insisted (Cunard and Padmore 2002, 137), the Charter fanned heated debates about the legitimacy of colonialism and the shape of post-war internationalism (Ibhawoh 2014, 835), both in colonial capitals and across the still vast terrains of empires. On his return from the Atlantic conference, Churchill felt compelled to assure his compatriots in Parliament that he intended only to restore self-government to European nations occupied by Germany, but he and Roosevelt soon had to answer questions about the extension of Atlantic Charter principles of self-determination to the great mass of dependent peoples still living under European colonial domination. In November 1941, Nnamdi Azikiwe, then editor of the West African Pilot and later the first president of Nigeria, cabled Churchill to ask, Are we fighting for security of Europeans to enjoy the four freedoms while West Africa continues on pre-war status?... We respectfully request your clarification of the applicability of the Atlantic Charter regarding Nigeria. This will enable us to appreciate the correct bearing of 21 million Negroes in the sea of international politics (quoted in Padmore 1942, 236).

On the other side of the North Atlantic, Roosevelt received a letter from Mohandas K. Gandhi pointing out that the Allied Declaration that the Allies are fighting to make the world safe for freedom of the individual and for democracy sounds hollow, so long as India, and for that matter, Africa are exploited by Great Britain, and America has the Negro problem in her own home (quoted in Borgwardt 2005, 545). The African American and Caribbean press propelled the anticolonial interpretation of the Charter forward, strengthening transatlantic intellectual and political solidarities throughout what, fifty years later, would become known as the Black Atlantic (Von Eschen 1997, 2528). For example, W. E. B. DuBois was invited, along with future Ghanaian leaders Ebenezer Ako-Adjei and Francis (Kwame) Nkrumah (then students at Lincoln University in the United States), and others, to help prepare a 1942 study by a New Yorkbased Committee on Africa, the War, and Peace Aims that outlined a plan for the application of Atlantic Charter principles of individual rights and collective self-government to a postwar, postcolonial Africa (Committee on Africa 1942).

Efforts to leverage the ideals of the Atlantic Charter proliferated around the globe. The Philippine statesman Carlos Romulo described the document as a flame of hope, and Algerian nationalist Ferhat Abbas invoked it as support for the cause of independence from France (Klose 2013, 2225). In the Dumbarton Oaks negotiations that led to the founding of the United Nations, it was Latin American representatives from the old South Atlantic colonies of the Spanish and Portuguese empires who insisted on amendments relating to the position of dependent peoples and to self-determination; they cited the Atlantic Charter as an international precedent (Brownlie 1970, 97). Those same principles later helped to consolidate domestic and international opposition to dictatorships across Latin America (Liss 1984, 36). Indeed, as Elizabeth Borgwardt notes, in the wake of the declaration of what became known as the Atlantic Charter, anti-colonial activists began to demand a Pacific Charter, an African Charter, or a World Charter as companions to the Atlantic one (2005, 554). This pressure pushed Roosevelt to contradict Churchill in early 1942 by announcing that The Atlantic Charter applies not only to the parts of the world that border the Atlantic, but to the whole world; disarmament of aggressors, self-determination of nations and peoples, and the four freedomsfreedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from want, and freedom from fear (quoted in Committee on Africa 1942, 30). Writing in 2005, Borgwardt calls this reading of the Joint Declaration Mandelas Charter (532), relocating the Charters spirit to the opposite pole of the Atlantic based on the South African presidents later recollection in Long Walk to Freedom: Inspired by the Atlantic Charter and the fight of the Allies against tyranny and oppression, the ANC created its own charter... [so that] ordinary South Africans would see that the principles they were fighting for in Europe were the same ones we were advocating for at home (Mandela 1994, 8384).

Thus, while the Charter strengthened the transatlantic bonds of imperial and proto-imperial power that came to dominate world affairs (manifested most powerfully in the subsequent formation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in 1949), it also internationalized principles that would Drawing on the language of promises made (and betrayed) in the North Atlantic, those struggles reshaped global politics and postcolonial societies and cultures for the rest of the twentieth century; they not only remade the modes and terms of transnational and trans-regional political association, military alliance, and economic and cultural cooperation (and contest), but they also created new imperatives for renewed forms of associative thinking and comparative study.