How African Decolonization Challenged the Notion of Cold War Polarity: The End of Empire, Modernization, and International Relations Theory in the 1950s and 1960s

Abstract

International Relations Theory (IR theory) has been cast by its critics as a Eurocentric discipline, obsessed with the bipolar international system that the Cold War competition between the Soviet Union and the United States created. While historians have laid bare the imperial roots of IR theory in the 1920s, they overlook the influence of African ideas on Realist, Idealist and Marxist theory after 1945. African decolonization raised questions about whether the post-1945 international system was truly bipolar or potentially multipolar. It also brought pan-African schemes of autonomous development to the fore, creating doubt in the U.S. about the ability to successfully deliver modernization programs, industrialization and foreign aid to the Global South. While realists like Hans Morgenthau were skeptical, Liberals like Joseph Nye felt modernization could only successfully be executed by Africans themselves while Wallerstein viewed foreign aid as a cynical imperial tool. Leading figures in the American academic field of international relations were forced to respond to African decolonization as they were developing their foundational work.