Universal Regionalisms: Continental Visions of Third-Worldism in Bogotá (1948) and Addis Ababa (1963)
摘要
For most international lawyers and global historians, the study of world ordering tends to revolve around the planetary governance of (allegedly) secular, liberal, and cosmopolitan North Atlantic institutions. In this narrative, anticolonial critiques of the “rules-based liberal order” have been dismissed as the lethargic and parochial pangs of Third World nationalism. Conversely, recent interventions in these fields have highlighted how decolonization entailed not only a call for the nation-state but also a thorough reimagination of the structures of global ordering. Drawing from—and aiming to contribute to—this literature, in this chapter, I explore two experiments in continental integration that attempted to forge a new post-imperial international order. In particular, I place the Bogotá 1948 IX Pan-American Conference—which led to the creation of the Organization of American States (OAS)—in conversation with the 1963 constitutional conference of the Organisation of African Unity (OUA), held in Addis Ababa. I argue we should read the erection of these two “regional parliaments” as concrete material sites pregnant with the promises of anticolonial imaginaries that attempted not only to build the nation-state but also to forge a new vision for worldly order in the wake of empire.