Empire, Race, and Connected Histories of Democratization

• In Event: Legacies of Race and Empire in IR and World Politics

Abstract

The nation-state has long been privileged as the unit of analysis in political science research on democratization. My paper problematizes this tendency, otherwise known as ‘methodological nationalism,’ in the context of recent moves in the field to "return to history" (Capoccia and Ziblatt 2010) and revisit the "first wave" of democratization in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I argue that the methodological nationalism of much democratization research has led to the recurring misrepresentation of many ‘first-wave’ European democracies as nation-states rather than imperial states, obscuring the prevalence of autocratic racial rule in their territories beyond Europe. I suggest, moreover, that recentring the imperial character of early European democracies – such that they appear more akin to conventionally recognized 'herrenvolk' democracies like Apartheid South Africa, albeit on a transcontinental scale – may complicate dominant geographic and temporal assumptions about the historical rise of modern liberal democracy itself. Building on efforts in postcolonial and global historical sociology to advance “connected histories” of modernity, I propose that historical democratization research should attend more closely to the co-constitution of liberal democracy between the West and non-West as opposed to presuming its linear diffusion from the former to the latter. To illustrate what a ‘connected histories’ approach to democratization would entail, I examine the intra-imperial contests over citizenship, suffrage, and representation that unfolded during the "federal moment" of the post-war French Empire.

Author

• Emerson Murray, Northwestern University