Worldmaking from the margins: interactions between domestic and international ordering in mid-20th-century India
| Author | Tobias Berger |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/13540661221115957 |
| Published date | 01 December 2022 |
| Date | 01 December 2022 |
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https://doi.org/10.1177/13540661221115957
European Journal of
International Relations
2022, Vol. 28(4) 834 –858
© The Author(s) 2022
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DOI: 10.1177/13540661221115957
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Worldmaking from the
margins: interactions between
domestic and international
ordering in mid-20th-century
India
Tobias Berger
Freie Universität Berlin, Germany
Abstract
This article investigates the contribution of decolonising states to the nascent
international order emerging after the end of World War II. More precisely, it
investigates the Indian contribution to the emerging international human rights regime,
focussing on two key contributions: the advocacy for a strong supranational authority
endowed with substantial enforcement mechanisms for the realisation of human rights
and the equally strong defence of a bifurcation of civil-political and socio-economic rights
into two treaties. Both contributions have been largely ignored within International
Relations – and where they have been acknowledged, they have been subsumed into
either narratives of liberal progress (as in the case of human rights enforcement) or
Cold War rivalry (as in the case of a separation of the two Human Rights Covenants). In
contrast, this paper seeks to shed light on the agency of Indian diplomats and politicians.
It shows how their positions were neither simply replications of pre-existing scripts
nor bare executions of superpower preferences. Instead, they were responses to the
challenges of becoming a post-colonial state in a still overwhelmingly imperial world.
Two challenges stood out: the definition of citizenship in light of internal diversity and
a widely dispersed diaspora and the challenge of development against the backdrop
of highly unequal global economic relations. In this article, I trace the movement of
key protagonists between the Constituent Assembly and the United Nations to show
how they were engaged in a project of postcolonial worldmaking, which required the
simultaneous transformation of domestic and international order.
Corresponding author:
Tobias Berger, Otto Suhr Institute of Political Science, Freie Universität Berlin, Ihnestr. 22, 14195 Berlin,
Germany.
Email: tobias.berger@fu-berlin.de
1115957EJT0010.1177/13540661221115957European Journal of International RelationsBerger
research-article2022
Article
Berger 835
Keywords
Global order, expansion of international society, decolonisation, human rights, India,
Hansa Mehta
Introduction
A few minutes after midnight on 15 August 1947, Hansa Mehta presented the Indian
national flag to the Constituent Assembly. In a symbolically laden moment, the presenta-
tion of the saffron, white and green flag with the blue Ashoka wheel placed in the middle
marked a moment of transition from colonised country to independent republic. Presented
on behalf of the women of India, the flag was first flown over Parliament Building where
the Constituent Assembly deliberated the contours of the yet to come postcolonial con-
stitutional order. Hansa Mehta was a key protagonist in this process. As an educator,
social reformer and women’s rights activist, she was one of the 300 members of the
Constituent Assembly; she was also a key representative of her country at the incipient
United Nations. In fact, she was part of a broader set of actors who moved back and forth
between the Constituent Assembly in India and various fora at the United Nations where
the emergent post-war order was negotiated. I take this movement as a starting point for
an inquiry into the ways in which the constitution of domestic and international order
hangs together to address two gaps in the literature on global ordering. On one hand,
most of this scholarship focusses on the central importance of powerful actors (e.g.
Adler, 2019; Allan, 2018; Buzan and Lawson, 2015) but neglects the importance of
notionally weak postcolonial states in the transformation of international order. On the
other hand, those accounts that do recognise the importance of peripheral actors in global
ordering processes (e.g. Becker Lorca, 2014; Getachew, 2019; Helleiner, 2016; Reus-
Smit, 2013; Sikkink, 2017) pay little attention to the ways in which the positions of
postcolonial states are grounded in domestic imperatives. Yet these imperatives are cru-
cial. As I argue in the following, focussing on the domestic grounds of postcolonial
worldmaking (Getachew, 2019) further deepens our understanding of the ways in which
key protagonists of decolonisation were erudite theorists of conceptually interdependent
domestic and international transformations. While often operating in seemingly familiar
categories, they endowed these with new and innovative meanings. Bringing these to the
fore by analysing how the international transformations they demanded were grounded
in the specific predicaments of postcolonial state-building has significant theoretical
implications: it decentres our understanding of the emergence and transformation of
global order and moves it away from either explicit or implicit reliance on Europe as
central reference point for international political theorising. Instead, it shows how the
post-war international order was at least partly produced elsewhere as it emerged from
the intellectual responses of postcolonial elites to some of the intricate difficulties caused
by colonial rule and the resultant predicaments of postcolonial state-making.
To advance this argument, I focus on the Indian case which reverberated widely
across the decolonising world in the 1950s and 1960s and ask: (1) how did India seek to
shape the emergent international order after World War II, (2) how are these attempts
grounded in the domestic concerns of creating a postcolonial democracy and (3) to which
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