Description
This paper explains how communities in the Caribbean and Pacific regions have sought to balance the autonomy-viability dilemma of post-colonial statehood—that political self-determination is a hollow achievement unless it is accompanied by economic development—by practicing sovereignty à la carte. Previous research has focused on the pursuit of decolonial self-determination through and above the nation state, via regionalism and internationalism, or by creating non-sovereign alternatives to it. This paper looks at how communities have pursued the same goals below the state, including via secession and devolution. Downsizing is typically portrayed as the antithesis of progressive, cosmopolitan internationalism and employed as evidence for the claim that the age of anticolonial self-determination has ended. This paper shows how these movements are animated by similar ideas and motivations that are rendered viable by the simultaneous pursuit of regional integration and forms of non-sovereignty. Taken together, the à la carte pursuit of self-determination through, above and below the state, and via non-sovereign alternatives to it, can be seen as a pragmatic response to the contradictions of post-colonial statehood amidst hierarchy. These mutually reinforcing strategies can thus explain why the postcolonial state appears to be infinitely divisible yet remains nested within ever complex multi-level constellations.
