Getachew
displaced anti-colonial world-making, and has been the order of the day
since the 1980s, is equally untenable. Its vision of an economy insulated
from political contestation and its rejection of distributive justice na-
tionally and globally have magnified inequality and contributed to the
rise of the new right. One vision would insulate nation-states from the
world; the other, the world from its people. In this context, demanding
a return to the liberal world order—as leading scholars in international
relations and international law have recently done—is an inadequate
response. It obscures the ways that the illiberal backlash of our moment
emerged out of the inequalities and hypocrisies of that very same system.
From our vantage point, the welfare world of the NIEO might
appear utopian and unrealistic. But to dismiss the world that decolo-
nization aspired to make is to refuse to reckon with the dilemmas we
inherited from the end of empire. It is to evade our responsibility to
build a world after empire. Our world, like Manley’s, is characterized
by a battleground of widening inequality and ongoing domination.
We cannot simply recreate the 1970s vision of a welfare world, but
we can take from its architects the insight that building an egali-
tarian and postimperial world is the only route to true democratic
self-governance.