But while adopting sovereign territoriality as the dominant script, they were far more cautious in accepting the principle of self-determination for all nationalist claims. While claiming the right of national self-determination as a rhetorical tool in the struggle with the metropolitan powers, they simultaneously denied those claims to indigenous groups within the territorial state that the nationalist leaders envisioned. The Dutch were not incorrect in asserting that the nationalist (Javanese) claim for Indonesian independence subverted the possible independence of many areas and ethnic groups within the East Indies. Sukarno himself of course recognized that “the Dutch had invented Indonesia” given that it had never been a coherent political entity before. [Sukarno] was eager to lay claim to the entire territory as a unified state on the principle of sovereign equality with other states, disregarding local demands for true national self-determination.
This is from the great Hendrik Spruyt, and you can read the whole thing (pdf) here.
I have two takeaways for NOL: first, the people who led decolonization efforts after WWII exploited the maps drawn up by imperial powers; they were not nationalists, they were cosmopolitans who had been educated in European capitals and who had borrowed the logic of nationalists in those capitals. Calls for federation instead of independence/decolonization were few and far between, but they did exist. Adam Smith called for union between the UK and its North American colonies. Several African statesmen called for federation between their lands and France. I believe some Indians called for federation between their land (which included present-day India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh) and the UK, but I need to do more research on this. In Hawaii, the federalists actually won out.
Second, the current narrative, or script as Spruyt calls it, still doesn’t give local/indigenous actors their due. The current Westphalian script — undergirded by the principle of sovereign equality with other states – still treats the leaders of decolonization like victims of imperialism who fought against the odds to defeat intransigent European oppression. There is simply not much being said about the people who called for greater representation within the European imperiums and for federal restructuring of these imperiums.
A third takeaway is that libertarians have a much better alternative to adopt than shallow anti-imperialism, which is just a form of antiwar nationalism: they could call for federation with polities as a foreign policy doctrine. They could actively build alliances with those factions that were squashed by nationalists who disregarded the claims of other groups, with the aim of integrating these societies into a federal order.
Notes On Liberty 