Nationalist and Trans-Nationalist Movements in Post-Colonial Asia, Africa, and Latin America

When the European empires retreated from Asia, Africa, and Latin America in the twentieth century, they left behind a question that was harder to answer than it first appeared: now that the colonisers were gone, what exactly was a “nation” supposed to be? The leaders who fought for freedom had a clear short-term goal – expel the foreign ruler. But once independence arrived, many of them did not simply turn inward to build isolated nation-states on the European model. Instead, they looked outward to their neighbours, imagining that genuine freedom required regional solidarity. This tension between the nationalist (building one sovereign country) and the trans-nationalist (uniting many countries across borders) impulse shaped some of the most important political movements of the post-colonial world.

Two faces of post-colonial nationalism 🔗

To understand why post-colonial nationalism looked so different from its European ancestor, it helps to recall what nationalism originally meant in the West. Classical Western nationalism, born in nineteenth-century Europe, was about matching a “nation” (a people with a shared language and culture) to a “state” (a sovereign government). The goal was a strong, centralised, self-sufficient nation-state – think of the unification of Germany or Italy. Power flowed inward, toward the capital.

Post-colonial nationalism began from a very different starting point. Across Asia and Africa, the most immediate shared experience was not a common language or ethnicity but a common enemy: colonial domination. In many African states before independence, nationalism was less about establishing a shared cultural identity and more about anti-imperialism itself. This produced a nationalism with two faces.

The first face was the familiar nationalist drive to win sovereignty and govern one’s own territory. The second was a trans-nationalist drive that recognised a hard truth: a single newly independent country, often poor and militarily weak, could be easily bullied or economically dominated by former colonial powers. Genuine independence, many leaders argued, could only be secured collectively. This is why the post-colonial era gave birth to grand projects of regional unity rather than just a collection of inward-looking states.

Pan-Asianism and the Indian vision of unity 🔗

In Asia, the idea of a shared identity opposed to Western domination is often traced to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when Japan’s modernisation inspired a sense that Asians could resist European power together. But the most ambitious post-war attempt to build Asian solidarity came from India.

The Asian Relations Conference, 1947 🔗

Even before India became formally independent, Jawaharlal Nehru convened the Asian Relations Conference in New Delhi in March 1947. Delegates from across the continent gathered to discuss colonialism, economic cooperation, racial discrimination, and the shared future of Asian peoples. Nehru carefully framed the meeting as non-political, but politics was clearly at its heart. Scholars argue that the conference was an early attempt to delineate a distinct Pan-Asian identity against the backdrop of colonialism.

The conference also revealed the limits of trans-nationalism. A proposal for a permanent Asian Regional Organisation eventually fizzled out, and Nehru himself was wary of any structure that might harden into a military bloc. He had his delegation quietly oppose proposals for military cooperation. The dream of Asian unity was real, but so was each country’s jealous guarding of its newly won sovereignty.

From regional identity to non-alignment 🔗

Nehru’s thinking gradually evolved from a cultural idea of “Asianness” toward a more practical political doctrine. In 1954, India and China articulated the Panchsheel, or Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence: mutual respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity, mutual non-aggression, mutual non-interference in internal affairs, equality and mutual benefit, and peaceful coexistence. These principles offered post-colonial states a code of conduct that protected weaker nations from being bullied by the powerful, regardless of military size.

This vision matured into the policy of non-alignment – refusing to join either the American or Soviet camp during the Cold War and instead charting a “third way.” Importantly, Nehru’s framework offered an alternative to Cold War binaries and later influenced Asian regional and sub-regional institutions long after his death. The trans-national idea did not disappear; it simply changed shape.

Pan-Africanism and the dream of continental unity 🔗

If Pan-Asianism remained somewhat loose, Pan-Africanism produced perhaps the boldest trans-national vision of all: a politically united continent. Its most forceful champion was Kwame Nkrumah, who in 1957 became the first prime minister of post-colonial Ghana.

Nkrumah and “Africa Must Unite” 🔗

Nkrumah was a driving force behind the practical and ideological foundations of Pan-Africanism. As a former PhD candidate at the London School of Economics, he argued that the revolution rested on two principles: equality for all peoples and races, and solidarity among the oppressed. For Nkrumah, the political freedom of any single African state was incomplete and even fragile so long as the rest of the continent remained dominated by imperial power.

This is the heart of the trans-nationalist argument. Nkrumah believed that small, fragmented states would remain economically dependent on their former colonisers – a condition he famously called neo-colonialism. The only durable answer, he insisted, was a “United States of Africa.” Pan-Africanism functioned as a political tool that helped African nations emancipate themselves from colonialism and shape their political and economic agendas after independence.

Why continental unity faltered 🔗

The grand vision ran into the same obstacle that limited Pan-Asianism: the powerful pull of the nation-state. Once independent, many African leaders were reluctant to surrender hard-won sovereignty to a continental government. Today, with established national identities and a strong emphasis on state sovereignty, the practical ambition of a single United States of Africa has been overshadowed by the reduced powers that states held after colonisation. The compromise was a looser structure – the Organisation of African Unity, founded in 1963, and later the African Union – which preserved national sovereignty while still pursuing cooperation. The trans-national dream survived, but in a diluted institutional form.

Latin American solidarity and “Our America” 🔗

Latin America’s experience adds an instructive twist, because most of the region won independence from Spain and Portugal more than a century before Asia and Africa decolonised. Yet the trans-national impulse there proved remarkably durable, repeatedly reborn in new generations.

From Bolívar to “Patria Grande” 🔗

The original trans-national figure was Simón Bolívar, the nineteenth-century liberator who dreamed of a confederation of Latin American republics strong enough to resist outside domination. His legacy gave rise to Bolivarianism, an ideology emphasising regional unity, social justice, and anti-imperialism. Over the decades, this idea was reinterpreted by thinkers across the region – José Martí’s vision of “Our America” in Cuba and the broader notion of a “Patria Grande” (a single great homeland) expressed the conviction that Latin American nations shared a common destiny.

What unified these visions was not opposition to a European coloniser, since the Spanish had already left, but resistance to a newer form of domination from the north. Latin American public law became rooted in the principle of non-intervention, reflecting the determination of newly independent states not to fall under the suzerainty of another foreign power after expelling Spain.

The twenty-first-century revival 🔗

The most visible modern expression of this tradition came with Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez, who explicitly revived Bolívar’s name in his “Bolivarian Revolution.” In 2004, Chávez and Fidel Castro launched the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA), described as an international alliance designed to reinforce the non-intervention principle through an anti-imperialist approach to foreign relations. Like the African and Asian projects, however, this revival proved vulnerable. ALBA depended heavily on Venezuelan oil revenues, and it weakened when oil prices collapsed and political tides shifted across the region.

Where the regions met: Bandung and beyond 🔗

The trans-national impulse reached its most dramatic global expression when Asia and Africa joined forces. The 1955 Afro-Asian Conference at Bandung, Indonesia, brought together delegates from twenty-nine recently independent or soon-to-be-independent countries. Bandung did more than any other meeting to advance the idea that post-colonial states had something distinctive to offer the world.

Out of this energy emerged the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), formally founded at Belgrade in 1961. Its architects – Nehru of India, Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, Josip Broz Tito of Yugoslavia, Sukarno of Indonesia, and Nkrumah of Ghana – represented exactly the convergence of Asian, African, and broader anti-imperialist solidarity that defines trans-nationalism. The Panchsheel principles became a guiding philosophy of the movement, and NAM gave the Global South a collective voice that no single nation could have commanded alone.

Yet Bandung also exposed the recurring tension. The very principles meant to guarantee peace could not prevent the 1962 border war between India and China – two of the leading architects of Panchsheel. The episode is a sharp reminder that solidarity built on shared grievance does not automatically translate into lasting cooperation once national interests clash.

Nationalist and trans-nationalist: rivals or partners? 🔗

It would be a mistake to see the nationalist and trans-nationalist strands as simple opposites. In practice they were two responses to the same problem. The nationalist impulse answered the question “how do we govern ourselves?” The trans-nationalist impulse answered the question “how do we stay genuinely free once we govern ourselves?” Leaders like Nehru and Nkrumah held both ideas at once, sometimes uneasily.

The pattern across all three regions is strikingly consistent. A powerful trans-national vision emerges from the shared experience of domination; it inspires conferences, alliances, and ambitious institutions; and then it runs into the immovable reality of state sovereignty, where leaders prove unwilling to dissolve their authority into a larger union. What survives is usually a looser form of cooperation – the African Union, ASEAN, SAARC, regional Latin American blocs, and NAM itself – that honours the dream of unity while protecting the independence of each member.

This legacy still shapes the world. The emphasis on sovereignty, non-interference, peaceful coexistence, and South-South cooperation that runs through groupings like BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation can be traced directly back to the trans-nationalist thinking of the decolonisation era. The post-colonial world did not simply copy the European nation-state; it argued, often fiercely, about whether the nation-state was enough.

What do you think? Was the trans-national dream of regional unity a realistic strategy for newly independent nations, or was it always destined to give way to the pull of national sovereignty? And in today’s world of renewed great-power competition, do you think movements like non-alignment still offer a useful “third way” for countries of the Global South?

References

1. https://ir.library.louisville.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4736&context=etd
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asian_Relations_Conference
3. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/07075332.2018.1434809
4. https://vajiramandravi.com/current-affairs/panchsheel-agreement/
5. https://www.lse.ac.uk/africa/hub-for-african-thought/thinkers/kwame-nkrumah
6. https://repository.usfca.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2240&context=thes
7. https://www.energypolicy.columbia.edu/publications/fighting-against-imperialism-latin-american-approach-international-sanctions/
8. https://testbook.com/ias-preparation/panchsheel-agreement