Human Rights in Pinochet’s Chile: The Dethronement of Politics 7 страница
In the course of the twentieth century, Mises and his neoliberal colleagues cast state planning, medical and employment insurance, protective tariffs and welfare states not simply as economic threats, but as threats to individual rights – and ultimately to civilisation itself. Like his Scottish predecessor Adam Ferguson, Mises believed that while the ‘most remarkable races of men … have been rude before they were polished’, the ‘polished’ nations might nonetheless slide back along the evolutionary scale.106 While Ferguson warned that a people might be corrupted by its commercial success, Mises believed it was socialism that was hastening the decline of civilisation. In Asia, he warned, antagonists of European civilisation were gathered under the banner of socialism. And if they were allowed to destroy the division of labour, ‘nomad tribes from the Eastern steppes would again raid and pillage Europe, sweeping across it with swift cavalry’.107
The key distinction between East and West, according to Mises, is that the East was ‘foreign to the Western spirit that has created capitalism’. As a result, he contended that, ‘if the Asiatics and Africans really enter into the orbit of Western civilisation, they will have to adopt the market economy without reservation’.108 Adopting the market did not merely mean adopting a technical means of allocating goods; it required a profound cultural, moral and subjective transformation. Market peoples are peace loving, Mises warned, but would fight to the death against anyone who interfered with this division of labour, and ‘repel the barbarian aggressors whatever their numbers may be’.109 Earlier, he had suggested that, if only some nations became socialist, the cause would not be lost. The remaining capitalist ones – driven by the ‘fundamental social law’ to extend the global division of labour – would ‘impose culture upon the backward nations or destroy them if they resisted’.110 Conversion or destruction were the only options available to those who sought to exist outside the world market.
Moral Integration: The Neoliberals Against Laissez-Faire
Freiburg economist and early MPS member Walter Eucken was typical of early neoliberalism in his belief that nineteenth-century liberalism had failed. This failure, Eucken wrote to his fellow German neoliberal Alexandre Rüstow, was not due to its religious and metaphysical foundations. Rather, when liberalism ‘lost its religious and metaphysical content, it decayed’.111 Eucken, one of the founders of Germany’s postwar social-market economy, shared the dominant MPS view that securing a competitive market order could not be left to the invisible hand. The experience of the political polarisation and crisis of Weimar Germany had alerted the German liberals to the moral, institutional and legal conditions for a competitive market order. Whatever their differences, the early neoliberals largely accepted that the survival of civilisation required state action to produce the conditions for a competitive market, including by promoting a conducive moral climate. Even the Chicago School’s Milton Friedman – who would later describe the invisible hand as Smith’s ‘great achievement’ – argued in 1951 that the collectivist faith in the state was ‘an understandable reaction to a basic error of nineteenth-century individualist philosophy’ and its embrace of laissez-faire.112
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Few were as vocal in their rejection of laissez-faire as the German ordoliberals Röpke and Rüstow. During the war, both men lived in Istanbul, where President Kemal Atatürk’s attempt to secularise and modernise Turkey prompted them to focus on the moral and religious foundations of a competitive market economy.113 Rüstow criticised the call to laissez-faire as both a ‘summons to honour God and an adjuration not to allow short-sighted human anxieties to interfere in the eternal wisdom of the natural law’.114 He believed it had led previous liberals into an overly ‘care-free’ faith that, left alone, the market would improve ‘moral standards’.115 The ordoliberals accepted that, by promoting mutual dependence, ‘the division of labour can be conceived as one of the most potent civilizing factors’.116 But theirs was not a straightforward ‘sweetness of commerce’ thesis; they regarded competition as morally dangerous and believed that, left alone, the market would not produce the necessary ‘lubricant of morals, sentiments and institutions’.117 Röpke derided the invisible hand as a ‘ “philosopher’s stone” that turned the base metal of callous business sentiments into the pure gold of common welfare and solidarity’.118 A competitive market order, the ordoliberals argued, required an institutional framework and ‘a generally observed and undisputed code of moral norms and principles of behavior’.119
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If moral integration was crucial within the borders of a single state, they argued that it was even more so in the international sphere, where the greater precariousness of order and the absence of a central state with a single authoritative body of laws placed a premium on shared legal and moral standards. It was only by finding a workable international substitute for the sovereign state, they believed, that the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had achieved that ‘socio-political integration of the civilized world’ without which no world economy would have been possible.120 By this stage, the neoliberals had already lived through the shock of Britain’s 1931 withdrawal from the gold standard, which they regarded as a central plank of an ‘international legal and moral system’ whose violation represented ‘the act of men without honour, honesty or scruples’.121 The international economic integration of the past two hundred years, Röpke argued, had required an ‘undisputed moral code’.122 For Mises, too, the gold standard had been about much more than commodity prices and foreign exchange: it had ‘born Western civilization into the remotest parts of the earth’s surface, everywhere destroying the fetters of age-old prejudices and superstitions, sowing the seeds of new life and well-being, freeing minds and souls to create riches unheard of before’.123
If economic disintegration was a product of moral disintegration, then a revival of dreams of perpetual peace required the development of moral and legal standards to support the global spread of the competitive market by protecting private property and human dignity. The market economy, Röpke argued, ‘belongs essentially to a liberal social structure and one which respects individual rights’, while non-market, collectivist coordination is coercive, ignoring such rights.124 The attempt to draft a universal human rights declaration might have made a contribution to the revival of such shared moral standards. But, of course, everything depended on how those rights were understood. For the neoliberals, human rights could only play this role if they broke with the rationalism of the French Revolution and fostered submission to the market order. While Christianity could not provide history or the market with a providential guarantee, they believed it could secure the moral foundations of a competitive market order ‘truly compatible with human dignity’.125
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Commerce and Christianity
In his masterful account of the Christian embrace of human rights in the twentieth century, the historian of human rights Samuel Moyn stresses how radically the version of human rights promoted by Catholics in the mid twentieth century differed from the revolutionary rights-of-man tradition, which the Church bitterly opposed throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. To a ‘rather disturbing extent’, he writes, ‘human rights and especially human dignity had no necessary correlation with liberal democracy’.126 Moyn doubts that the embrace of liberal principles by conservative Christians was a victory for liberalism. Could it be, he asks, that Christianity and conservatism changed liberalism more than vice versa, as the language of rights was ‘extricated from the legacy of the French Revolution’ and tethered to a religious, conservative agenda?127 This transformation, I suggest, did not simply come from outside. In attempting to free human rights from the French Revolution, conservative Christians tapped into an internal transformation of liberalism pioneered by the figures associated with the MPS, who sought to re-establish liberalism on secure moral foundations.
This was clear in Hayek’s opening address to the Society’s inaugural conference, which deplored the rationalistic liberalism of the French Revolution. Unless the ‘breach between true liberalism and religious convictions can be healed’, he argued, ‘there is no hope for a revival of liberal forces’.128 The importance of Christianity to the new liberal project was reflected in a session at that conference on ‘Liberalism and Christianity’, which included twelve speakers drawn from across Europe, the UK and the United States. Although none of the Society’s founders were active representatives of the Catholic faith, Röpke noted in 1957, this ‘circle of technicians’ soon turned its attention to the relation between Christianity and freedom. They became conscious, he suggests, that liberals and Christians, ‘concerned for freedom and human dignity’, shared common ground they did not share with their collectivist enemy.129
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The neoliberal embrace of Christianity was not necessarily a product of faith. Hayek was himself agnostic, but he believed that Christianity was essential for cultivating the morals of the market and the willingness to submit to the market order.130 A ‘refusal to submit to anything we cannot understand’, he warned in The Road to Serfdom, ‘must lead to the destruction of our civilization’.131 Hayek believed that the rise of rationalism made people unwilling to submit to anything they did not understand. Through this refusal, he argued, the rationalist may become the ‘destroyer of civilization’, and we will be ‘thrown back into barbarism’.132 The Austrian economist acknowledged that this submission has historically been achieved by religions, traditions and superstitions ‘which made men submit to those forces by an appeal to his emotions rather than to his reason’.133 But he made clear this was preferable to the preoccupation with reason he saw in his own time.
The Chicago School’s Frank Knight was relatively isolated in his belief that communism and the Catholic Church shared the same principles and were similarly undemocratic. The year after the UDHR was adopted, Knight suggested that the Church at least deserved credit for ‘not pretending to believe in democracy or individual liberty’.134 As Moyn notes, however, the position of the Church was also changing in the face of the threat that socialism and fascism represented to its autonomy and to the freedoms of conscience and worship. The drafting of the UDHR therefore attracted the attention of conservative Christians, who were similarly concerned with the re-establishment of moral standards and saw in human rights a means to protect the dignity and conscience of the human person and preserve intermediate institutions (like the Church and the family) in the face of the rise of ‘totalitarianism’.
For the neoliberals, communism was not simply a competing European political movement; communism was ‘a pseudo-religion within the shell of the Russian state, a sort of secularized Islam’, in Roepke’s words, communists were emissaries of an empire bent on world domination.135 With this ‘Communist Pseudo-Islam’ there could not be ‘one world’, but only a mobilisation of Europe against the threat of fanatical hordes from the East.136 This assimilation of communism, totalitarianism and Islam recurred frequently in the writings of the neoliberals, who drew on orientalist tropes of inassimilable otherness to discredit their adversaries. Mises, whose beloved Habsburg Empire had long been viewed as the bulwark against the Ottoman Empire, argued that, while socialism’s rapid expansion had been compared to that of Christianity, it would be more appropriate to compare it to Islam, ‘which inspired the sons of the desert to lay waste ancient civilizations, cloaked their destructive fury with an ethical ideology and stiffened their courage with rigid fatalism’.137 In 1961, MPS vice-president, Albert Hunold, criticised those intellectual leaders he deemed ignorant of ‘the real nature of totalitarianism’ and ‘incapable of pointing out the ways and means by which a check can be imposed upon this “new Islam” and a policy initiated that is worthy of the dignity and strength of our western civilisation and culture’.138
Here, too, the neoliberals were close to conservative Christians. Such views were echoed by the Lebanese UN delegate Charles Malik, who drafted the Universal Declaration’s preamble with its ringing assertion that the ‘inherent dignity of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world’. For Malik, who insisted on the inclusion in the UDHR of ‘religious ciphers’ such as ‘inherent’, ‘inalienable’, ‘endowed’, it was ‘Western civilization’ that contained at its core ‘the truest reality of human dignity’.139 In contrast, he argued that ‘certain elements in Islam admit of an interpretation that accords with Communism’.140 Malik singled out the ‘blind fatalism of Marx’, and called on the West to take action to ensure that the ‘alliance between Communism, radical nationalism, anti-Westernism, xenophobia and religious reaction and fanaticism need not be the last word’.141 Several years earlier, in the course of posing the question ‘Whither Islam?’, Malik had depicted Arab history as dominated by the ‘overwhelming numbers of lower classes and the absence of the middle class’, which had had led to the domination of ‘the masses and of the mob’.142 All these considerations came to the fore as UN delegates debated the right to change one’s religion. Christian advocacy on behalf of missionaries would ultimately bolster the neoliberal attempt to enshrine new standards to protect the rights of traders across the globe.
The Right to Change One’s Religion and the Mission of Human Rights
One of the most intractable debates about human rights concerns the legitimacy of intervention across borders to prevent their violation. Whether or not such legitimacy is legitimate is often thought to hinge on the answer to another question: How universal is the provenance of human rights? While some attempt to construct a multicultural Whig history by identifying the origins of human rights in ancient Hindu texts or the writings of Confucius, it is more common to point to the participation of delegates from Lebanon, China, Saudi Arabia or India in the drafting of the UDHR as evidence that human rights have a cross-cultural legitimacy capable of grounding human rights interventions.143 For critics, on the other hand, human rights universalism is marked by a history of European colonialism, and serves both to facilitate and to obscure the coercive reconstruction of societies on capitalist lines. The anthropologist Talal Asad, for instance, situates human rights in a lineage stretching back to the Spanish colonisation of the Americas, for which the extension of European law was explicitly viewed as a project of cultural and religious transformation; most human rights theorists, Asad argues, ‘don’t address seriously enough the thought that human rights is part of a great work of conversion’.144
These debates were prefigured during the drafting process of the UDHR. It was in the course of the drafting debates about freedom of conscience and conversion that the relation of human rights to earlier patterns of coercive intervention became a topic of fierce dispute. Charles Malik, who championed the right to freedom of conscience, has been portrayed as a figure at the ‘crossroads of many cultures, and personally and professionally shaped by both Christianity and Islam’.145 But the Lebanese diplomat was hardly an ideal mediator between religious traditions. An Orthodox Christian by birth, though with a strong predilection for Roman Catholicism, Malik would later align – during his active participation in Lebanon’s civil war – with the Christian Maronite sect. Malik’s role as an active participant in his own country’s sectarian conflicts has not dented his image in human rights scholarship as a figure who embraced tolerance and mutual understanding. The Palestinian intellectual Edward Said, whose mother’s cousin was married to Malik, gives a very different account, describing Malik as ‘the symbol and the outspoken intellectual figurehead of everything most prejudicial, conflicted, and incompatible with the Arab and largely Islamic Middle East’.146 Malik was not the ‘surrogate for the absent Muslim voice’ on the commission on human rights that he has often been portrayed as.147
Malik’s Christianity deeply informed his stress on a spiritually unified ‘West’. In a 1952 essay, he wrote that ‘the West is unthinkable apart from Christianity and the East apart from Islam’.148 Malik was more committed than many of the European delegates to constructing an idea of ‘the West’ characterised by ‘Greece, Rome, Christianity’, the democracy of the ‘Anglo-Saxon experience’ and the French Revolution.149 The argument that this Christian influence was inclusive, with ‘broad appeal across many cultures’, obscures the extent of Malik’s universalist Christian commitment to the transformation of non-Western societies.150 Like Rüstow and Röpke, with whom he shared a conservative Christian fear of the intrusions of politics, Malik took the view that global economic integration required moral transformation; if the ‘undeveloped countries’ wished to develop their economies, he argued in 1953, they would need to absorb not only Western techniques but also three thousand years of Western scientific tradition and a commitment to ‘the inherent dignity of the human person’.151
Malik portrayed freedom of conscience as the central value of this Western heritage. This provenance meant that ‘not all claims of conscience are therefore seen as being equal in the UDHR.’152 Not only did Malik assume the religious and Christian contours of conscience; he also argued, more controversially, that the right to change one’s religion was a necessary aspect of this ‘Platonic–Christian tradition’.153 Malik saw such a right as central to upholding freedom of conscience in the face of two key adversaries: a ‘mass’ (working-class and communist) politics whose focus on economic welfare threatened to reduce the human to a material, rather than a spiritual, being; and Islam, which, according to Malik’s Orientalist depiction, lacked reason and distinction, and fused different orders (God and the universe, man and God, man and animal, and past and future) so that, in Islam, ‘man – as to his origin, his powers, his state, and his destiny – is exceedingly ambiguous’.154
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