The Berlin Conference

NOV 15 1884 · 12:00

Contemporary engraving of the Berlin Conference (Kongokonferenz), 1884 to 1885. Place: Reich Chancellery, Wilhelmstraße 77, Berlin Figures: Otto von Bismarck, host · Henry Morton Stanley, present as technical adviser to the United States delegation · Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza, French explorer · Leopold II of the Belgians, conspicuously absent and entirely the point · the African polities, all uninvited Fourteen Powers at the Wilhelmstraße Bismarck convenes the conference at Leopold II's request and partly to assert German interests in a scramble that France and Britain are otherwise dividing between themselves. Fourteen delegations attend: Britain, France, Germany, Austria-Hungary, Belgium, Denmark, Spain, the United States, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Russia, Sweden-Norway, and the Ottoman Empire. No African polity is represented. The session opens on 15 November 1884 and closes on 26 February 1885 with the General Act of Berlin. The Act establishes free trade in the Congo and Niger basins; bans the slave trade; declares the Congo Free State (Leopold's private holding) a neutral zone. Article 34 establishes the principle of effective occupation: a claim to African territory is recognized only when accompanied by demonstrable administration on the ground. Article 35 obliges the occupying power to maintain authority and protect existing trade. The legal effect is to convert the West African coast and the great river basins into a grid of claims that must be filled in by actual conquest. Westphalia Goes Planetary The Berlin Conference is the first formal European agreement on the partition of an entire continent. In 1880, perhaps ten percent of Africa is under European rule; by 1914, all but Ethiopia and Liberia is colonized. The Westphalian state's project of extending itself to the planet is now coordinated through treaty rather than improvised. The Congo Free State (1885-1908) becomes Leopold's personal property; the rubber regime imposed there kills perhaps half the population over twenty-three years before Belgian state annexation in 1908. The conference's deeper innovation, which will outlive the formal empires it organizes, is the principle that sovereignty outside Europe is a status to be conferred by Europeans on European terms. African polities, including ancient states with continuous administrative traditions (Ethiopia, Bornu, Asante, Oyo), are treated as objects of recognition rather than as subjects of it. The double standard that the UN Charter (see [[un-charter-1945]]) will formally repudiate sixty years later is here written into the public law of Europe. Decolonization, when it comes, will use Westphalian categories against the very system that codified them. Video: The Berlin Conference inside the broader scramble for Africa it formalized.