Managing the World: The United Nations, Decolonization and the Strange Triumph of State Sovereignty in the 1950s and 1960s

This article examines a 1956 United Nations effort to respond to decolonization, by supplying newly independent governments with international administrators to help build sovereign nation-states out of the disintegrating European empires and anchor them firmly within the capitalist world. The article reveals the UN as a significant historical actor during the Cold War beyond the organization’s function of providing a forum for intergovernmental debates and lobbying. While the initiative never resulted in a large-scale response to decolonization, it ultimately effected a substantial shift in the practice of development assistance: from advisory services to a more paternalist approach that focused on ‘getting the work done’ on behalf of aid recipients. Recovering this history helps account for the strange triumph of state sover- eignty in the second half of the twentieth century: its global proliferation at a time when inter- national actors became increasingly active in the management of the public affairs of developing countries.