This chapter lays out the book’s argument in two parts. First, it first develops the concept of self-determination as understood by state and non-state actors in the Global South to apply to the legitimate exercise of power in the international system. Rather than requiring strict sovereignty and exclusion of outside actors, self-determination is about the nature of cooperation and international involvement. It requires that people, through their governments, be able to domestically affirm international rules and to meaningfully participate in their enforcement. The second part of this chapter explains how establishing regional organizations as an authority over issue areas can be a strategy for realizing self-determination and why, in the case of human rights, it necessitated compromising on the norm of non-interference. This strategy is effective at deterring pressure from Western governments because it combines and appeals to widely held beliefs about the legitimacy of self-rule with beliefs about the importance of exercising power through international organizations.

This chapter explores implications of the argument made in this book for other areas of international relations scholarship and for contemporary international politics, with regional authority and self-determination continuing to occupy an important place in the international politics of the Global South. It considers how incorporating the importance of self-determination, and the idea of regional organizations as a means of realizing it, can provide more complete understandings of contemporary political phenomena. I discuss how the argument in this book sheds light on the Global South’s dissatisfaction with liberal norms and institutions, the openness of democratic states in the Global South to cooperation with illiberal powers, and present-day dynamics of regionalism, including the creation of “new” regions and the growth of “authoritarian” regional organizations.

Latin America was the first and most intense target of the imposition of economic enforcement of human rights. The strategy of establishing regional organizations as authorities over human rights emerged in response to these new enforcement policies. This meant greatly expanding the authority of the Organization of American States and, for the first time, allowing it to interfere in member states’ internal affairs to enforce human rights. This strategy emerged first as an authoritarian survival strategy put forward by the Chilean government in response to unprecedented challenges to its domestic behaviors. However, democratic leaders in the region transformed it into a strategy involving real enforcement once economic pressure spread to the entire region. As this chapter demonstrates, the idea that regional organizations have special authority over human rights had not been taken for granted prior to this, as human rights were not understood as an issue that could be altered to fit local contexts. Instead, Latin American leaders–including democracies and leaders supporting human rights enforcement–argued forcefully for this new authority.

As ethnic competition gained momentum on the local level, similar developments occurred at the regional level. Decolonization in the postwar period involved constitutional reform and the slow development of African political parties. The British government used constitutional reform to ensure its political and economic interest to maintain the status quo, while emerging African political parties engaged constitutional reform to make various claims for self-determination. The British government insisted African political parties operate at the regional level and discouraged any efforts to form broad, multi-ethnic, cross-regional nationalist parties, such as the National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons (NCNC) had aimed for. By 1952, broad nationalist sentiments had distilled into a regionally focused politics. In this context, ethnic majorities within each region had more power than their minority counterparts. The emerging regionalist politics informed the development of a minority consciousness among Niger Delta elites in the 1950s, and they engaged the constitutional reform process through their positions as minorities to claim the right to self-determination.

Framing nineteenth-century American realism within William Dean Howells’s dialect movement, which encouraged authors from Mark Twain to Stephen Crane to capture characteristic accents from every corner of the country, this chapter argues that America’s “native-born” speech came to serve as the correlative of “native-born” citizenship on the page. As a literary solution to a legal battle over American belonging, the dialect movement produced not only a distinctively American national canon but also facilitated the rise of the modern nation-state, demonstrating how diverse ethnic populations could be made to speak with one voice: the voice of the people. Yet as illustrated by a close reading of Howells’s 1890 A Hazard of New Fortunes, there remained one kind of accent that could never be assimilated: the voice of a poor man. As a closely-inspired allegory of the 1886 Haymarket Affair scapegoating German socialist August Spies, Hazard demonstrates that a poor man, speaking as a poor man on behalf of the principles of international socialism, could never be made to count as a good American because the engine of the nation-state relies on the difference between rich and poor to make it run.

This chapter explores how country and city stand in as proxies for political, racial, and cultural positions. The country operates as the custodian of the “real America,” which becomes imagined as white, masculine, traditionalist, and working class. The city, meanwhile, teems with the elite and the cosmopolitan. Such gestures conjure away any trace of Indigenous peoples, migrant farmers and ranchers, urban–rural labor alliances, black agrarian Populists, and the city’s intersectional working class. Even as we must acknowledge the generative role country-and-city scholarship has played in US literary criticism, this chapter ultimately calls for rethinking this binary by turning to texts that provide a different account of the rural – a narrative that the country as a concept so effectively obfuscates. Writing by authors such as Hamlin Garland and Zitkála-Šá, conventionally categorized as local-color or regionalist, demonstrates that scarcity and survivance rather than city and country shaped the cultural politics of rural spaces in the nineteenth century. They both challenged the bureaucratic state, as an entity that protected the interests of finance capital by subjecting settlers to constant precarity and violently seeking to dispossess Indigenous peoples of their own land, liberty, and literature.

This chapter covers regional loyalties and religious institutions, focusing on the Kulturkampf, the state’s attack on Catholicism.

This introduction outlines the main questions and debates which the book addresses, followed by an overview of the history of the Heimat idea and the study’s methodological approach. While scholars have looked at post-war cinematic and literary Heimat tropes, the book argues for more attention to Heimat as specific sites of home. On the question of the concept’s Germanness, it steers a middle path that recognizes how the history of German-speaking Europe has shaped the concept, while acknowledging its connection to broader questions about place attachment. Rather than positing a single “German” understanding across time and space, the work approaches discussions about Heimat as an evolving and contested discourse about place attachments and their relationship to diverse political and social issues. The introduction continues by outlining the book’s contribution to debates about West German democratization, reconstruction, post-war confrontation with dissonant lives, and expellee history. It concludes by outlining the book’s findings on the history of efforts to eliminate the concept in the 1960s and left-wing attempts to re-engage with Heimat in the 1970s and 1980s.

Chapter 8 analyzes East Asian regionalism projects, which demonstrate that the choices of governments and non-state actors constitute the structure of East Asian international relations, albeit within evolutionary constraints. East Asian countries are not integrating in a European Union sense, but their desire for and efforts at regional cooperation remain strong. East Asian regionalism was underdeveloped compared to Europe and some other developing regions, but an economic regionalism open to non-East Asian countries emerged when the Cold War ended. The 1997 Asian Financial Crisis trigged greater East Asian efforts at creating more exclusive economic and financial groups, but East Asia has shifted to mega regionalism since the early 2010s, reflecting growing great power rivalries between Japan, China, and the United States. Other East Asian countries, particularly those in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), have their own agency and drive the process in more immediate terms.

This chapter examines the post-WWII era where the idea of exclusive Convention Peoples Party (CPP) radicalism and Pan-Africanism rests most thickly. It argues that debates about the CPP’s Citizenship Act complexifies its pan-African credentials. Also, the CPP’s political philosophy was not radical and distinct compared to its opponents, as it fits within a broad liberal/ cosmopolitan tradition rooted in Europe and America. So-called conservatives were oftentimes more radical, as shown in parliamentary debates on the “Motion of Destiny.” Contentious discussions about whether to achieve self-government by proclamation or negotiation, are obscured by the dyad of radical versus conservative. Debates about federalism, regionalism, and unitary government remain unexplored because the grand narrative rebukes the opponents of Kwame Nkrumah’s socialist agenda, while granting him hero status. Nkrumah’s prolific writing and the squeezing out of his opponents after he became Prime Minister in 1957 are identified as the architects of Ghana’s grand narrative.

This chapter explores the rapid “coming apart” of white working-class communities across the American South as the New Age of Inequality (post-1980) settled in. As the economic doldrums took hold across swaths of the American South and its diaspora during the decades since 1980, social dysfunction emerged with a vengeance in white working-class communities, a phenomenon that captured national attention through J. D. Vance’s depiction in his best-selling Hillbilly Elegy (2016). Older industrial cites suffered and declined as the economy deindustrialized. The many challenges the faltering economy presented to white southern workers and their communities stimulated a visceral response from disaffected workers, a response manifest in angry efforts to reclaim white privilege and the aggressive championing of “traditional” values, and ultimately an unprecedented level of death and despair. The complex story of disruptive economic forces, lingering racial resentments, and fierce atavistic loyalties led white southern workers to choose clinging to cultural values over building alliances that might redress their economic grievances.