Evil Empire 37domain of technocratic expertise. In doing so, they rejected the claim
that the global economy could be subject to demands for redistribution.
The colony went free, stood for a brief moment in the sun, then moved
back again toward servitude—this time to the empire of debt.
almost forty years after the triumph of neoliberalism over the
NIEO, it is difficult to imagine that another world was possible. In
accepting this triumph as inevitable, we have forgotten that decolo-
nization promised not only to free nations from foreign domination,
but also to remake the world. From our perspective, the wave of
independence movements that followed World War II is largely
associated with the moral and legal delegitimization of alien rule,
the transition from colony to nation, and the expansion of the inter-
national society to include previously excluded African, Asian, and
Caribbean states. In this view, anti-colonial nationalists appropriated
the principle of self-determination and the modular form of the
nation-state, expanding and universalizing languages and institutions
with a European provenance.
This is a compelling narrative because it describes the world that
emerged from decolonization. In the three decades between 1945 and
1975, UN membership had grown from 51 states to 144. At the turn
of the twentieth century, European states ruled 84 percent of Earth’s
surface; by 1975 the remnants of alien rule, largely in southern Africa,
appeared to be anachronistic and barbaric holdouts. However, this
narrative obscures some of the most innovative aspects of the politics
of decolonization by eliding its global ambitions. And it thereby misses
the mechanisms by which empire reasserted itself, persisting into our
time and reinforcing global white supremacy.