New Declarations
By invoking the American Revolution, twentieth-century anticolonial figures connected their project with the movement for civil rights in the United States.
On September 2, 1945, as the anticolonial struggle spread across French Indochina, Ho Chi Minh presented the Declaration of Independence of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam at a mass meeting in Hanoi. The proclamation opened with a citation of the 1776 American Declaration of Independence: “All men are created equal. They are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights; among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
That even a Vietnamese communist saw fit to quote from the American Declaration might be seen as confirmation that those immortal words of 1776 carried a universal message to the world. As legal scholars Aslı Ü Bâli and Aziz Rana have argued, this was certainly the interpretation favored by mid-century policymakers in the United States who viewed the American Constitution as an institutionalization of the country’s unique commitment to liberty and sought to universalize this model. After the Second World War, this project took two forms. First, policymakers promoted constitution-writing in the defeated powers of Germany and Japan as well as in newly decolonizing societies with the aim of exporting institutions that curbed majoritarianism and instituted checks and balances. Second, policymakers designed institutions of global governance that enshrined the constitutionalist commitment to legal restraint by proliferating multilateral regimes.
Rather than viewing invocations of the American Declaration by Third Worldists as simply proof of their universality, however, we might consider the strategic and constructive ends for which American ideals proved so useful. At the beginning of the twentieth century, references to the American founding were aimed at interrupting or inverting the binary relation of colony and metropole by introducing the United States as a third site of comparison and rhetorical leverage. As the country came to be a dominant power and played a central role in shaping international institutions, invocations of the founding American ideals were also deployed to participate in a wider discourse about the future of the international order and to insist that self-determination was foundational to a post-imperial world.
To describe this rhetoric as strategic does not mean it was simply instrumental. Often these invocations operated with the view that American ideals could be realigned and realized in ways that facilitated aspirations for emancipation around the world. Such a view operated with a clear sense of America’s history of colonialism and slavery and aimed to align the forces of global anticolonialism with the progressive domestic politics of civil rights.
In Ho’s proclamation, the citation of the American Declaration is quickly followed by a reference to the 1789 French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, which begins by stating, “Every man is born equal and enjoys free and equal rights.” France, however, had betrayed this universal commitment. Its imperial policies were abuses of the French revolutionary principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity, Ho argued, and “counter to the ideals of humanity and justice.” Despite the contrast Ho drew between France and the United States, he was not naive about the latter. As part of the subterranean network of radical anti-imperialists that Tim Harper calls “Underground Asia,” Ho claimed to have spent time in Boston and New York working as a laborer. In Harlem, he may have attended meetings of Marcus Garvey’s pan-African Universal Negro Improvement Association. While in France, he published a range of essays on Garvey, racial violence in the United States, and colonialism in Africa. However, in the immediate context of the battle against French imperial rule, an invocation of American ideals served as a generative counterpoint, an alternative revolutionary and political tradition on which to draw.
Ho drew on a long-standing practice that the political theorist Kevin Pham calls “strategic occidentalism.” Examining Vietnamese anticolonial pamphlets from the 1920s, Pham argues that they compared American and European civilizational achievements and celebrated George Washington’s heroism, linking the American qualities they admired to their own traditions. On this view, the United States was exemplary because it unwittingly exhibited Confucian moral excellence. Through such a characterization, Vietnamese anticolonialists urged their followers to adopt a progressive interpretation of Confucianism and to engage in projects of self-cultivation.
African and Asian writers did not always portray the United States in such glowing terms. In the early twentieth century, for instance, British West African newspapers frequently juxtaposed the rise of indirect rule to the entrenchment of racial barriers in the United States. Papers like the Gold Coast Leader referred to Britain’s self-congratulatory representation as a bulwark of global abolition and urged the British Empire to not reproduce Jim Crow. In the July 1902 issue of the paper, the editors wrote:
Inter-racial prejudices at this stage of the twentieth century seem greatly out of place. . . . Things are bad enough in America [where] there is no admission for negroes at hotels, restaurants and boarding houses. . . . But we are living in an English Colony, and fortunately for us in all the phases of our individual and social life as negroes, there is a security or a protection enjoyed, which is not known by our ill-starred brothers in the certain parts of the States.
Here comparisons between Britain and America were mobilized to urge the former to protect the rights of its colonial subjects.
As the United States became a more powerful international actor and played a decisive role in formation of the global order after the Second World War, invocations of America’s ideals also aimed to intervene in shaping that order. Ho’s early citation of the American Declaration is connected to a claim that appears later in his proclamation: “We are convinced that the Allies who have recognized the principles of equality of peoples at the Conferences of Tehran and San Francisco cannot but recognize the Independence of Viêt Nam.” Referencing the 1943 meeting of U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin in Iran, where they sketched postwar plans, and the San Francisco Conference where the United Nations Charter was drafted and approved, Ho speaks as if the Allies have already committed to the principles that Vietnamese anticolonial revolutionaries and their counterparts around the world were fighting to institutionalize.
This claim was sustained by the view that holding the self-evident truth that “all men are created equal” committed the United States to the principle of the equality of peoples. The eighteenth-century revolutionary principle of individual equality was transmuted into a collective ideal.
From the 1940s to the 1960s, anticolonial nationalists across Africa and Asia elaborated on this argument, claiming that any project of international human rights must involve a bedrock commitment to the collective right to self-determination. They frequently made the case by highlighting the racist exclusions that undermined America’s commitment to universalism. Responding to the refusal to include representatives from the colonies at the San Francisco Conference, and recognizing that self-determination would likely be excluded from the UN Charter, Nnamdi Azikiwe, a journalist and anticolonial activist who later served as Nigeria’s first president, penned an editorial in which he declared “there is no new deal for the blackman. . . . Colonialism and economic enslavement of the Negro are to be maintained. . . . We shall not be happy until the world is rescued from its half slavery and half freedom.” In case his reference to Roosevelt’s slate of public works projects, economic and financial reforms, and social welfare programs was lost on his readers, his editorial a week later reiterated that “one half of the world cannot enjoy the Four Freedoms whilst the other half are merely told of their blessings.” Linking Roosevelt’s domestic program and his war aims, Azikiwe spoke directly to the aspirations of the American Century in which the United States would play a leading global role. The Four Freedoms were the international corollary to the domestic New Deal, and in both cases, the universal commitment to freedom and equality were undermined by the boundaries of the global color line. Internationally and domestically, half-slavery and half-freedom (an echo of the “house divided” that Abraham Lincoln had warned of in 1858) not only signaled the hypocrisy of America, but also portended destabilization and conflict.
When Azikiwe addressed the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1959 on the occasion of the organization’s fiftieth anniversary—and just a year before Nigerian independence—he celebrated the “spirit of the American Negro . . . [which had] given the United States a fair chance of reconciling the theory of democracy with its practice” and “fired the imagination of the sleeping African giant, who is now waking up and taking his rightful place in the comity of Nations.” For Azikiwe, the “spirit of 1776” was to be found among “Americans citizens of colour” who were “in the ironical position of constantly reminding certain segments of American society” of the ideals upon which the country was founded.
That America was a settler-colonial empire before it was a global hegemon meant, as Azikiwe well understood, that the ideals of the nation were contested and put to the test domestically before they were taken up by colonial subjects elsewhere. From the struggle for abolition to the civil rights movement, African Americans had calibrated their appeals to American ideals with an eye to the international standing of their nation. When W.E.B. Du Bois wrote to Woodrow Wilson to insist that his championing of “the consent of the governed” ought to be realized at home as much as it should be in the former colonial territories of the German and Ottoman Empires, he reminded the president that “the world is wondering to-day how America is going to avoid at least an indictment of inconsistency and perhaps a suspicion of insincerity. No epoch in the history of our nation has been so propitious as the present to clear the atmosphere of doubt as to the national intention in this matter.” In 1947, Du Bois organized the NAACP’s petition to the United Nations—An Appeal to the World—to similarly apply pressure to the contradiction between America’s self-presentation as a bastion of liberty and equality and the ongoing practices of Jim Crow. In his introduction to the Appeal, Du Bois recognized the singularity of “a nation which boldly declared ‘That all men are created equal’” but warned that American democracy had become “unworkable by paradox and contradiction.”
In these various invocations of the American Declaration and American ideals more broadly, we find not a singular position, but instead a variety of rhetorical strategies that were responsive to specific contexts and political purposes. If in the early twentieth century the American example was mobilized to demand the rights of colonial subjects as in the Gold Coast Leader or to galvanize a nascent nationalism as in the case of Vietnamese occidentalism, by the mid-twentieth century the charges of American hypocrisy grew more pronounced as anticolonial nationalists sought to reshape the American Century in ways that advanced decolonization.
The charge of hypocrisy might seem like a limited tool for their purposes when read as a simple plea that the powers that be align their practices to their principles. But this was not the primary purpose that critics of American hypocrisy pursued. For Du Bois, it was a moral condemnation of the gradual erosion and distortion of democratic ideals, a call for a new founding of the nation. By contrast, inhabiting the gap between principle and practice, anticolonial critics reinvented the former and placed themselves as the agents of the latter. In their hands, universal principles needed to be reanimated and reinvented as with the demand for a collective right of self-determination. The acts of reinvention and realization were as much in the hands of those reading Azikiwe’s West African Pilot or listening to Ho at the mass meeting as they were with the powers gathered in San Francisco and Tehran.
In his address to the NAACP, Azikiwe described the United States as “the cynosure of the world.” The United States’s historic democratic experiment and the struggle of black people to make good on the promises of its founding had kept the country before the world’s eyes.
As the United States celebrates the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, it is the reckless decisions made by the financial and military hegemon of the world that keep the United States before the world’s eyes. The kidnapping of a national leader, the unprovoked initiation of war, the defunding of the U.S. Agency for International Development and ever-shifting and narrowing rules on immigration cast a wide and ominous shadow on the world. At the same time, new aspirants to global hegemony and emerging regional powers offer the postcolonial world alternative models for state formation and development.
In this context, the strategic leverage that Azikiwe and others sought by inhabiting the gap between principles and practices is no longer available. But his insight that the fate of the world was tied to the experiences and struggles of America’s citizens of color remains a powerful one. In 1959, disenfranchised African Americans stood out starkly against the backdrop of white supremacy to illustrate the internal contradiction of American society, and to broadcast the possibilities and challenges of representative democracy on the world stage. Today, the internal other of the United States is, itself, the world: Haitians in Ohio, Somalis in Minnesota, Arab Americans in Michigan, Venezuelans in New York, and countless more. In the struggle against the occupation of America’s cities, in the refusal of a genocide supported and funded in our name, in the slogan “no one is illegal on stolen land,” new declarations are being written. It is here that a new contract between America and the world will be forged.
Adom Getachew is Professor of Race, Diaspora, & Indigeneity, and Political Science at the University of Chicago. She is author of Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination.