'Symbolic Decolonization and Postal Politics: Sovereignty, Secession and the Stamps of Pseudo-States in Sub-Saharan Africa, c.1960-1979' by Gary Baines in (2024) 2(26) Monde(s) 113-134 comments
Since its inception, the Universal Postal Union (UPU) has designated its members as “countries” and “territories”. Historically, stamp-issuing members have included non-self-governing entities such as colonies, protectorates, and mandates that were controlled by an imperial or metropolitan power [1]. Following decolonization, the UPU’s membership swelled with the admission of a slew of newly independent nation states. Yet, contrary to the conventions of international relations in the post-colonial world, the UPU has avoided describing its members as “states”. This is arguably a manoeuvre designed to allow the agency to sidestep politically sensitive disputes regarding sovereignty. Taking its cue from United Nations (UN), the UPU has seldom admitted secessionist or self-proclaimed independent states as members. But such states have issued stamps in order to assert their sovereignty so as to further their claims to international recognition in the comity of nations. However, stamps are only fully invested with sovereign power if they are accepted as valid receipts for prepayment for postage on a reciprocal basis with other states [2]. In the case of secessionist or unilaterally independent states in 1960s Sub-Saharan Africa, the UPU refused to recognize their stamps and subjected their mail to sanctions. These measures challenged their sovereign claims.
Sovereignty is a discursive claim rather than a factual description of realities on the ground [3]. As such, it is contested and contingent [4]. The struggle for sovereignty occurs not only in the political sphere but also in the realm of symbolism. The creation and adoption of new national symbols such as flags and anthems were a critical part of the decolonizing process in former sub-Saharan African colonies which had previously been denied sovereignty. Kenrick refers to efforts to establish the trappings of new sovereign states as symbolic decolonization [5]. His study of the repertoire of symbols created by Rhodesia after its Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) is instructive but makes no reference to stamps. However, Brownell has authored an excellent essay on how the visual rhetoric of Rhodesian stamps projected the white settler state’s claims to sovereignty [6]. Hammet explains how South Africa’s “Bantustans” with their “constrained sovereignty” used stamps to express their nationhood via the tropes of territoriality, identity, and political authority [7]. And Inyang shows that Biafra employed similar signifiers on its stamps to invoke the promise of sovereignty [8]. This paper will suggest that stamps issued by Katanga, Biafra, and Rhodesia to commemorate independence signalled to the world that they had achieved statehood. However, the sovereign claims of the three would-be states were rejected on the grounds that they were not entitled to exercise authority within their territories nor act independently of outside authorities.
While diplomatic recognition is the prerogative of individual states, collective non-recognition went a long way in determining whether states were accepted in the family of nations. Katanga, Biafra, and Rhodesia were never accorded recognition by the international community. They were not admitted as members of the UN and consequently enjoyed no standing in the UPU. Exclusion of these pseudo-states from the UPU meant disputes over matters such as the franking of stamps and the delivery of mail, and the disruption of international postal services. Much against its better judgment, the UPU’s Directorate became party to the politicization of these services. This much was apparent from the imposition of postal sanctions designed to prevent the reciprocal exchange of mail with these pseudo-states. This paper demonstrates that the contestation over the validity of the pseudo-states’ stamps and the distribution of their mail was part and parcel of their struggle for sovereignty.
'The Shibboleth of Sovereignty' by Martin Loughlin and Stephen Tierney in (2018) Modern Law Review comments
The legal doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty is such a fundamental tenet of constitutional belief that we commonly assume it to be of ancient provenance. In reality, it is a late-nineteenth century creation. Its author, the Victorian jurist Albert Venn Dicey, presented it as the central element of a work that sought to shift the basis of British constitutional thought. Noting that hitherto the constitution had been treated as a historical phenomenon, he argued that constitutional scholars, having been seduced by speculative ideas, had been drawn into a ‘maze in which the wanderer is perplexed by unreality …, by antiquarianism, and by conventionalism’. Criticizing those who regarded the constitution as an object of veneration, he maintained that the scholar’s duty must not be to eulogise but merely to analyse and expound.
Dicey argued that a scientific explanation could be advanced only by establishing a new and autonomous field, that of ‘the law of the constitution’. Noting that Blackstone in his influential Commentaries on the Laws of England of 1765 nowhere uses the term ‘constitutional law’, Dicey claimed to have discovered a new branch of legal knowledge. Deploying a legal positivist method, he defined this new subject as one concerned to analyse ‘all rules which directly or indirectly affect the distribution or the exercise of the sovereign power in the state’. Having re-orientated the object of study towards the rule order of the British state, Dicey confidently asserted that the basic rule of the constitution is expressed in ‘the doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty’. This is the rule that the Crown-in-Parliament ‘has, under the English constitution, the right to make or unmake any law whatsoever; and, further, that no person or body is recognised ... as having the right to override or set aside the legislation of Parliament’. This foundational doctrine was presented as an objective and technical rule about the relative authority of sources of law.
Dicey’s great achievement is to have been the first to apply a rigorous juristic method to the study of the British constitution. This provided subsequent generations of lawyers with a clear and relatively simple framework of analysis. But that is not all: his discovery of the ‘law of the constitution’ also caused subsequent generations of lawyers, despite continuing to pay lip service to the evolutionary character of the British constitution, to regard the underlying basic law as of timeless authority. Notwithstanding developments since the late-nineteenth century which have transformed the character of modern government, lawyers continued to uphold his account of the basic rule.
Continuing adherence to Dicey’s account, we argue, is now creating a ‘hopeless confusion both of language and of thought’ which flows from a failure to distinguish between the particularity of Dicey’s legal doctrine and the general concept of sovereignty. And the failure to recognise that his legal doctrine is inextricably tied to a particular political belief about authority is causing constitutional lawyers to become ‘perplexed by unreality’.
We aim to substantiate these claims by differentiating Dicey’s legal doctrine from the general concept of sovereignty (sections III and IV) and then examining the contemporary consequences of this conflation (section V). But the political basis of the legal doctrine must first be explained (section II). Our key point is that no sooner had Dicey finished criticizing those who eulogise rather than analyse than he revealed that his fundamental legal doctrine rested its authority on a particular political belief, one which he treated as an article of faith. He hinted at this when noting that ‘the omnipotence or undisputed supremacy throughout the whole country of the central government’ is a feature that has ‘at all times since the Norman Conquest characterised the political institutions of England’. But it came more clearly into view when, within a year of publishing The Law of the Constitution, he published the first of his three books opposing home rule in Ireland. In this work Dicey invoked sovereignty not as a legal doctrine but explicitly as a political precept. Here he argued that home rule, which evidently does not undermine the legal doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty, is nevertheless ‘a plan for revolutionising the constitution of the United Kingdom’. This type of claim can only stem from a political belief of the necessity of maintaining untrammelled authority at the centre. ‘Each successive generation from the reign of Edward I onwards’, he later explained, ‘has laboured to produce that complete political unity which is represented by the absolute sovereignty of the Parliament now sitting at Westminster’. This ‘political unity’ expresses what he called the ‘instinctive policy of English constitutionalists’. Sovereignty is here not being expressed as a formal doctrine; it is a political conviction about the need for an unrestricted central power.
Notwithstanding his claim to be dispassionately presenting the law of the constitution, Dicey was making a politico-legal argument about sovereignty. His formal legal doctrine is inextricably tied to a substantive political conviction. And it is this politico-legal conception, we argue, that rapidly acquires the status of an article of faith among the British governing class. In blending the political and legal aspects of sovereignty in such an inchoate manner, Dicey presented as ‘the very key-stone of the law of the constitution’ a thoroughly ambiguous conception of sovereignty. Subsequent changes in the conditions of governing might cause us to question those political assumptions and in turn to qualify the meaning and status of the legal doctrine. But this has not happened; Dicey’s unacknowledged and highly particular conception of sovereignty is now preventing the British from thinking creatively about constitutional matters.
