Human Rights in Pinochet’s Chile: The Dethronement of Politics 4 страница
Although human rights NGOs came to prominence in the context of the evisceration of social welfare protections and public services, these concerns rarely entered the frame of their early advocacy. In his major biography of the ‘International Human Rights Movement’, Aryeh Neier, the former head of Human Rights Watch, suggests that the rise of human rights coincided with a shift of Cold War rhetoric, from a focus on economic competition between communism and capitalism to one on the political conflict of ‘repression, or totalitarianism, versus liberty, or human rights’.115 I argue that major international human rights and humanitarian NGOs embraced the central neoliberal dichotomy between commercial or ‘civil society’ – understood as a realm of freedom, voluntary interaction and distributed, private power that checked the centralised power of the state – on the one hand, and politics, understood as violent, coercive and conflictual on the other. They defended the same (anti-)political virtues the neoliberals attributed to the market: restraining political power, taming violence and facilitating a margin of individual freedom.
Like the neoliberals, major international human rights NGOs initially embraced law to restrain politics, while avoiding engagement with those social and economic rights that could only be achieved through political action, not judicial sanction. The methodology of many human rights NGOs, as Kenneth Roth, the director of the US-based Human Rights Watch notes, consists in the ability ‘to investigate, expose, and shame’, which involves identifying a particular violation, a specific violator, and a clear remedy.116 This has made these NGOs both reluctant and unsuited to challenge the structural and impersonal effects of market processes. Nevertheless, while supposedly eschewing coercion, major human rights NGOs, including Roth’s, have been quite prepared to call on the military might of the most powerful states to intervene in the name of securing human rights and universalising a distinctive moral order. In the process, they often aligned with the neoliberal embrace of a ‘strong security state, stripped of its social capacity’ so as to protect the market and enforce the morals of the market across the globe.117
Then, as today, the content of human rights was a product of political struggle. Human rights are not given by nature, and there has never been a single human rights movement capable of securing general agreement about a list of rights and their order of priority, let alone realising these rights for all. But to stop at pointing out that ‘human rights’ lacks a unitary meaning, as Susan Marks notes in a related context, is ‘silently to signal that these phenomena are isolated problems, unrelated to wider processes, tendencies and dynamics at work in the world’. By leaving unexamined the tendencies and dynamics that bring such transformations about, as Marks notes, we occlude an understanding of what would be necessary to achieve genuine change.118 Such ‘false contingency’ neglects the ways in which political possibilities are framed by systemic constraints. Specifically, the belief that human rights are endlessly polyvalent treats them as free-floating, disconnected form the structures of contemporary capitalism, unmoored from the historical conditions and defeats that brought them into being. It obscures the fact that not all figures of the human and of community are equally capable of ‘signifying within the text of human rights’.119
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This book begins in the late 1940s, with the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the founding of the Mont Pèlerin Society. The early parts of the book explore those strands of neoliberal thought that were particularly focused on the requirements of a ‘civilisation’ that early neoliberals depicted as indistinguishably moral, racial and economic. In the first three chapters, I focus predominantly on early neoliberalism, and on the leading figures associated with the Austrian School of economics and the ordoliberalism of the German Freiburg School. The central characters of these first chapters are Austrian School figures Mises and Hayek, British economist Lionel Robbins, German ordoliberals Wilhelm Röpke and Alexander Rüstow, Swiss diplomat and economist William Rappard, and French philosopher Bertrand de Jouvenel – though many others make cameo appearances. While not without their significant disagreements with one another, these figures were united by a concern with world order (as Quinn Slobodian has highlighted), and by the conviction that international economic integration presupposed what Röpke called ‘extra-economic integration (social-political-moral-institutional-legal integration)’.120
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In Chapter 1, I read debates about civilisational hierarchies during the drafting of the UDHR against neoliberal attempts to defend what they portrayed as a threatened Western civilisation. I show that, while anticolonialists succeeded in ridding the UDHR of the language of ‘civilisation’, the neoliberals constructed a new standard of civilisation that would secure submission to the international market. Chapter 2 turns to social and economic rights. I show that the neoliberals rejected mid-century welfarism, which they argued confused society with a household and was therefore ‘totalitarian’. Nonetheless, I also argue that, in defining social and economic rights as flexible standards that did not imply binding obligations on states, the drafters of the UDHR developed an account of social and economic rights that was ultimately compatible with a privatised, neoliberal approach to the management of poverty. Chapter 3 turns to the question of colonialism. It shows that, as the anticolonial struggle for a right to self-determination focused increasingly on economic self-determination, the neoliberals challenged Marxist theories of imperialism by defining imperialism as a problem of politics, not capitalism. I argue that, in promoting a dichotomy between the market as a realm of mutually beneficial, free, peaceful exchange, and politics as violent, coercive and militaristic, the neoliberals sought to inculcate the morals of the market and pathologise those political struggles which threatened the assigned places of postcolonial societies in the international division of labour.
In the second half of the book, I turn to the 1970s and 1980s, as the neoliberals embraced the language of human rights promoted by a new generation of human rights NGOs, and these NGOs in turn adopted the neoliberal dichotomy between violent politics and peaceful civil society. I show that the earlier neoliberal critiques of the UN human rights process were now replaced by far more ambivalent attitudes, as the neoliberals recognised that this new interventionist human rights language might assist them in their own goals of enshrining a moral order for global capital. These chapters show that earlier European neoliberals’ concerns with the moral, legal and subjective conditions for competitive markets were far more central to the Chicago School and to later neoliberal development theory than is often understood. Chapter 4 examines the role of neoliberal thinkers in General Augusto Pinochet’s violent imposition of a new economic and institutional order in Chile. I argue that the central neoliberal concern was to depoliticise Chilean society and secure submissive subjects. It was in this context that human rights NGOs came to prominence, for contesting the junta’s violence. The problem, I argue, was not that the human rights NGOs allowed the neoliberals to obscure the relation between their economic shock and the political violence necessary to impose it, as is often suggested. Rather, in conceptualising the problem as politics and the solution as law, the human rights NGOs bolstered the neoliberal dichotomy between violent politics and peaceful markets, secured by constitutional restrictions. Chapter 5 examines the foundation Liberté sans Frontières (LSF), established by the French leadership of the respected humanitarian organisation Médecins sans Frontières in the mid 1980s. It shows that, in this period, the language of human rights was directly aligned with neoliberal challenges to the postcolonial attempt to formulate a New International Economic Order. Far from being powerless companions, the figures of LSF worked alongside neoliberal development economists such as Peter Bauer to combat demands for postcolonial economic justice.
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What I call neoliberal human rights are not the only form of human rights that have existed historically. As many scholars have pointed out, and as I show in detail throughout this book, social democrats, socialists and anticolonialists used the language of human rights throughout the twentieth century for ends that were at odds with neoliberal perspectives of the period, including to demand social welfare, national self-determination and racial equality.121 Nor do I claim that today’s human rights campaigns necessarily further neoliberal ends. My focus is on hegemonic conceptions of human rights, rather than uses of human rights by marginalised and subaltern groups. It is no doubt true, as theorists of rights have argued, that the claiming of rights can generate a site of ‘creativity and agency’, and that a politics of rights can open up a democratic space for ‘perspectival claims’ that seek to persuade rather than to shut down political contestation.122 But I do contend that the neoliberal contribution to human rights has been far more widely influential than most contemporary human rights defenders would like to admit – and not only on the political right or in the halls of power. Without coming to terms with that influence, social movements and struggles that wield the language of human rights to contest neoliberalism may instead find that they strengthen its hold.123 The story I tell here is the story of how neoliberal thinkers made human rights the morals of the market.
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‘The Central Values of Civilization Are in Danger’
The spirit of the barbarians, which the Western peoples thought they had tamed by centuries of struggle, is abroad again and threatens to destroy the civilizing work of all these centuries.
Wilhelm Röpke
The civilized world can only seek and find a universal philosophy that, by its total humanity, will be able to maintain the tradition of civilization in spite of a totally inhuman enemy.
Walter Lippmann
The statement of aims of the neoliberal Mont Pèlerin Society (MPS) begins with a warning: the ‘central values of civilization are in danger’.1 In language that echoes that of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), which was being drafted across the Atlantic at the same time, the 1947 statement signalling the consolidation of neoliberalism declared that the essential conditions of ‘human dignity and freedom’ had largely disappeared.2 In his opening address at the society’s inaugural meeting, Friedrich Hayek said that the experience of the ‘actual decay of civilization’ had taught European thinkers lessons not yet learnt in the UK and the United States.3 In a foreword to the 1956 American edition of The Road to Serfdom the Austrian economist explained that the book aimed to show that state economic controls and public monopolies could destroy the market economy and ‘gradually smother the creative powers of a free civilization’.4 This threat, Hayek believed, long preceded the outbreak of World War II; everywhere, liberal ideals and free markets were threatened by the rise of collectivist mass politics, and only those who could remember the period before World War I knew what a liberal world was like.
The early neoliberals saw themselves as fighting for more than an economic programme; at stake, they believed, was the survival of ‘Western civilization’. Faced with widespread demands for socialism, state welfare provision and economic planning, they turned their attention to the moral values and subjective qualities underpinning a competitive market order. ‘Self-discipline, a sense of justice, honesty, fairness, chivalry, moderation, public spirit, respect for human dignity, firm ethical norms – all of these are things which people must possess before they go to market and compete with each other’, wrote the German ordoliberal, Wilhelm Röpke.5 The neoliberals portrayed these moral and subjective qualities as the products of a civilisation whose foundations were in Greece, Rome and Christianity, and whose ‘basic individualism’ was the inheritance of Erasmus, Montaigne, Cicero, Tacitus, Pericles and Thucydides.6 This construction of Western civilisation was deeply anachronistic. Neither the ancient Greeks nor the Romans understood themselves as part of ‘the West’, and nor were their various conceptions of the self and the subject compatible with neoliberal individualism.7 Yet the claim to speak on behalf of Western civilisation allowed the neoliberals to recast their adversaries not merely as representative of rival political and economic movements but as threats to civilisation and the freedoms and rights it provides.
All this was laid out clearly in the MPS’s original statement of aims, which condemned central economic direction because it conflicts with the ‘right of each individual to plan his own life’. Like the preamble of the UDHR, the neoliberal statement stressed freedom of speech, thought and expression, and restraint of arbitrary power. Rejecting now-outdated nineteenth-century laissez-faire, it framed the competitive market as the product of an appropriate institutional framework and a rule of law. It also noted that the trends leading towards ‘totalitarianism’ were not confined to the economic realm but had also emerged in morality, philosophy and the interpretation of history. Conflating communism, fascism and social democracy, the neoliberals argued that all systems that organise social efforts towards a single goal ‘are totalitarian in the true sense of this new word which we have adopted to describe the unexpected but nevertheless inseparable manifestations of what in theory we call collectivism’.8 A free society, in contrast, required a competitive market economy, and what the MPS statement called a ‘widely accepted moral code’ governing collective as well as individual action.9
The attempt to produce such a shared moral code as a response to a civilisational crisis was also central to the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. ‘Disregard and contempt for human rights’, its preamble notes, ‘have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind’. In contrast to its pride of place in the Mont Pèlerin statement, however, the word ‘civilisation’ does not appear in the UDHR, and nor do its cognates ‘civilised’ and ‘uncivilised’. While all the attendees at the initial meeting of the MPS came from Europe, the United Kingdom or the United States, the drafting of the UDHR involved delegates from the East and West, from colonial powers and recently independent nations, from Christian and Muslim societies, and from trade unions and religious organisations. The inclusiveness of its drafting should not be overstated; more than half of the world’s people still lived under colonial rule and were therefore unable to influence its account of ‘universal’ humanity.10 Nonetheless, unlike the neoliberals, who believed firmly in the superiority of ‘Western civilisation’, delegates at the UDHR were soon embroiled in conflicts about the perpetuation of civilisational hierarchies in a document supposed to specify the rights of all human beings.
The contested category of ‘civilisation’ provides a unique lens through which to view the evolution of both human rights and neoliberalism, both of which have been criticised as new iterations of a colonial civilising mission. Critics of neoliberalism have noted that structural adjustment programmes implemented by the international financial institutions – the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization (WTO) – have had dramatic effects on societies of the Global South, remaking both economies and subjectivities along Western capitalist lines. Critics of human rights have also pointed to the parallels between contemporary human rights universalism and the mixture of humanitarian moralism, economic interest and brute violence of colonial rule. Such criticisms extend to human rights organisations based in the Global North, which have been charged with revitalising the ‘international hierarchy of race and color’ that privileges white people as models and saviours, and portrays racialised subjects as either victims or ‘savages’.11
Such claims for continuity with older civilising projects are not made only by critics. The political theorist Jack Donnelly argues that human rights provides a new iteration of the so-called classical ‘standard of civilisation’, according to which membership in the ‘family of nations’ was reserved for those who fulfilled certain moral, legal and economic criteria, and restrained ‘shockingly uncivilized practices’ such as slavery, piracy and polygamy, while protecting individual rights and freedom of commerce.12 The International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS), which reframed humanitarian intervention as the ‘Responsibility to Protect’ notes that human rights are often seen as ‘the contemporary Western values being imposed in place of Christianity and the “standard of civilisation” in the 19th and early 20th century’.13 The Chicago School economist and virtue ethicist Deirdre McCloskey is one of the most explicit contemporary defenders of the thesis that commerce is sweet and civilising; she argues that, in making it necessary to negotiate mutually beneficial market exchanges, ‘as a civilized people must’, capitalism instils a series of ‘bourgeois virtues’: prudence, temperance, justice, courage, love, faith and hope.14 For many contemporary advocates of neoliberalism and human rights, the racism that animated the older standard of civilisation may be distasteful, but the need for international moral and legal standards that facilitate and ‘civilise’ the economy, and establish criteria for membership in the ‘international community’ has not gone away.15
Following the fall of the Berlin Wall, human rights organisations largely dispensed with the language of ‘backward races’ and ‘civilised nations’ that was still central to liberalism in the early twentieth century, while advocates of neoliberalism replaced explicit racial hierarchies with a seemingly objective discourse of economic development, economic growth, good governance and economic freedom. Today, the rise of what Daniel Pipes of the Middle East Forum refers to as ‘Pro-Christendom, Pro-European and Pro-Western’ ‘civilisationist’ parties is often understood as a populist reaction against both human rights and neoliberalism, which are associated with universalism, non-discrimination and equality before the law.16 Such a characterisation stumbles upon the fact that many of these same parties and leaders, notably US President Donald Trump, combine explicit appeals to Western civilisation and anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim racism with fiscal discipline, corporate tax cuts and further retrenchment of the remnants of the welfare state. This chapter demonstrates that this combination is not new; it had an important place among the preoccupations of the early neoliberals, for whom defending ‘the West’ meant developing a moral framework to protect the competitive market.
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