The Illusion of Sovereignty: Independence Never Delivered in Africa or the Carpathian. Part 1

Seventeen African countries raised new flags, established new constitutions, and sent delegates to the United Nations in 1960, the Year of Africa, according to historians. The world reacted positively to the official start of a new era of “independence.” But was that enough?

Philosopher Rana Dasgupta, in his sweeping 2025 work After Nations, tracing the rise and fall of the nation-state system, has observed that international law itself was constructed not as a neutral architecture of order but as a mechanism for legitimating and perpetuating the power relations established during the European empire. The implications for postcolonial states are severe: they inherited a global legal and financial system designed, in its bones, to keep them subordinate.

What Sovereignty Actually Means

The Peace of Westphalia (1648) was the first time that the notion of the sovereign nation-state was defined in the legal framework, which brought together two principles: bringing an end to the Thirty Years War in Europe and establishing the principle that the sovereign of a state has complete authority over their state.

This was the basis of how global politics have functioned for three centuries, but not without great amounts of strife and violence.

For the colonial world, the Westphalian system was invoked only selectively.

While European empires asserted sovereignty over their own territories, they simultaneously denied that notion to the Indigenous groups who were enslaved by said empires. Decolonisation in the mid-20th century provided new countries with formal sovereignty, yet the existing international system was and remains set up as a system primarily benefiting the West.

Real sovereignty, as distinct from its ceremonial version, requires several interlocking capacities. A genuinely sovereign state must be able to control its own monetary policy and financial system; develop its industrial base on its own terms; access and deploy technology competitively; prevent external actors from appropriating its natural resources; and make foreign and domestic policy without a veto from outside powers. By these standards, most states in the Global South are, at best, partially sovereign.

“The nation-state system has become a mechanism for transferring resources from poor regions to rich ones. International law, far from being neutral, perpetuates the power relations instituted during the European empire and actively prevents nations from rising in the economic hierarchy.” — Rana Dasgupta wrote in his book “After Nations” (2025)

“The nation-state system has become a mechanism for transferring resources from poor regions to rich ones. International law, far from being neutral, perpetuates the power relations instituted during the European empire and actively prevents nations from rising in the economic hierarchy.” — Rana Dasgupta wrote in his book “After Nations” (2025)

The Martinican-Algerian psychiatrist and revolutionary thinker Frantz Fanon understood this half a century before it became........

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