Internal Frontiers. Jon Soske

the leadership of a cultivated middle-class intellectual such as Nehru, and its self-appointed role as the diplomatic champion of the Third World, may well have represented the possibility that world politics was in the process of becoming more “American.”³⁷ It was in this postwar opening that he saw the greatest opportunity to advance the African’s cause.

      Whatever its continuities with earlier ANC traditions, Xuma’s approach departed from his predecessors by articulating the national aspirations of Africans within an internationalist framework of human rights and the nation-state. After the publication of the Allied war aims, the 1941 Atlantic Charter signed by Churchill and Roosevelt, Xuma began to strategize ways to interject the ANC’s voice into the coming negotiations over the contours of the postwar world.³⁸ He also recognized that the foundation of the UN created the possibility for Africans to circumvent their disenfranchisement and utilize the body to indict South Africa’s racial policies. The consequences of this strategic reorientation were far reaching. Removing African politics from the geography of the British Empire, Xuma located the project of African nationalism within a problem space defined by the globalization of the nation-state and a new understanding of legitimate sovereignty. As independent India demonstrated, membership in the community of nations was no longer based on liberal conceptions of homogenous political community and democratic capacity derived from Western civilization. In this emerging world order, the nation-state derived its authority from the promotion of a globally binding framework of international law based on universal human rights.³⁹