9 - “That Has Been Our Program for Fifty Years”

Summary

Chapter 9 argues that the ICI endorsed decolonization in 1945, which did not equal independence. In 1949, it was renamed the Institut International des Civilisations Différentes (INCIDI). Under its “decolonized” name, the INCIDI perpetuated the ICI’s transnational and transcolonial governmentality in the form of modern functional governance. In the 1950s and 1960s, it cooperated closely with UN development agencies, ECOSOC, UNESCO, and American foundations such as the Phelps-Stokes Foundation. These new international development agencies adopted the ICI/INCIDI’s fifty years old schemes of sustained development, cultural relativism, international functional governance, cooperative mutual aid schemes, and corporatist pseudo-representation. What is more, former fascists who continued to be in the ICI/INCIDI, or joined it to rehabilitate themselves, worked together with advocates of a European Economic Community to pursue the project of an economic Eurafrica. This chapter unveils how the ICI/INCIDI’s commitment to a more participatroy Eurafrica, to civilizational diversity, and even to anti-racism served the purpose of making the overseas territories economically and socially dependent. While the INCIDI always wanted to “emancipate the colonies loyally,” it increasingly appropriated anti-colonial internationalism and hypocritically styled itself as a “second Bandung” in the 1960s.