Human Rights in Pinochet’s Chile: The Dethronement of Politics 6 страница
Perhaps more surprisingly, the mandates were also a laboratory for the transnational monitoring of human rights. In a 1946 article, ‘Human Rights in Mandated Territories’, Rappard noted the strangeness of the UN Charter’s claim to protect human rights.57 Refusing the ‘deplorable cynicism’ of dismissing this new language as pious wishes, he sought to distil a conception of human rights from the work of the PMC. Human rights were best understood as the individual’s ‘general freedom from oppression’, he argued, which meant that, in protecting freedom of conscience and religion and suppressing the slave trade, the mandate system had always been serving human rights.58 Rappard’s key lesson, however, concerned the means of promoting human rights. The PMC comprised diplomats and former colonial officials with no coercive powers, he wrote; its only resource was its ‘moral authority’, which enabled it to shame governments in front of their own citizens. Such impartiality and independence, he wrote in another essay of the same year, allowed the PMC to function as ‘an international or rather a super-national moral authority’.59
Rappard argued that a body of independent experts who wielded moral authority and the threat of publicity offered the best means of ‘enlightening and influencing public opinion within and beyond national boundaries’. It was because he believed that the mandate system had at least partially succeeded in this task that Rappard saw it as a model for the UN’s new human rights project.60 In the subsequent years, as the drafting of the UDHR commenced, Rappard’s lessons seemed to have been ignored by delegates who clashed over political and economic questions and challenged the civilisational hierarchies that motivated the mandate system. His model of the transnational moral authority of impartial experts from the Global North would have to wait several decades to be revived as the dominant model of international human rights activism. When a new generation of human rights NGOs emerged that wielded moral authority and expertise in the public sphere, they flourished alongside concerted attempts to bind postcolonial states to the interests of private capital.
Universal Human Rights and the Fading of the Standard of Civilisation
The UN human rights process of the 1940s, which gave each sovereign state an equal vote, broke starkly with the elite moral authority Rappard distilled from the mandate system. The involvement of non-European states and representatives of the Soviet bloc in the drafting process seemed to the neoliberals to be a reflection of the crisis of civilisation, not a solution to it. During the drafting of the UDHR, delegates from China and Saudi Arabia, among others, sought to relativise ‘Western civilisation’ and remind the European powers that a declaration of human rights could not be based on a single cultural tradition. The presence of delegates who had once been excluded from ‘civilised’ law-making bodies changed the terms of the debate. China had long been forced to accept humiliating concessions in the form of incursions by European traders and missionaries.61 Muslim societies existed outside that group of states that, before they became ‘civilised nations’, had been known simply as ‘Christendom’.62 Delegates from these societies, and from recently independent countries – notably India – were unwilling to allow the attempt to formulate a list of human rights to enshrine the superiority of Western civilisation.
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Early in the drafting process, Eleanor Roosevelt reflected on an early meeting over tea between herself, the Chinese delegate Peng Chun Chang, the Lebanese delegate Charles Malik and the Canadian Director of the UN Secretariat’s Division on Human Rights John Humphrey:
Dr Chang was a pluralist and held forth in charming fashion on the proposition that there is more than one kind of ultimate reality. The Declaration, he said, should reflect more than simply Western ideas and Dr Humphrey would have to be eclectic in his approach. His remark, though addressed to Dr Humphrey, was really directed at Dr Malik, from whom it drew a prompt retort as he expounded at some length the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas. Dr Humphrey joined enthusiastically in the discussion, and I remember that at one point Dr Chang suggested that the Secretariat might well spend a few months studying the fundamentals of Confucianism!63
At this point, Roosevelt reflects, the conversation became ‘so lofty’ that she was unable to follow’, and so she refilled the tea cups and ‘sat back to be entertained by the talk of these learned gentlemen’.64
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Chang, who earned a PhD in the United States studying with the American pragmatist philosopher John Dewey, was committed to ensuring the declaration avoided metaphysical presuppositions and reflected both the diversity and the interpenetration of cultures and traditions.65 In a drafting meeting in June 1948, he drew attention to the influence of Chinese thought on Enlightenment thinkers such as Voltaire, Quesnay and Diderot, who had embraced China as a model of a moral order without superstition. Resisting the idea that ‘European civilisation’ was hermetically sealed, he told the drafters that ‘Chinese ideas had been intermingled with European thought and sentiment on human rights at the time when that subject had first been speculated upon in modern Europe.’66 In articulating a vision of human rights that drew on diverse cultural traditions, Chang resisted civilisational hierarchies, pre-empting subsequent theorists who have depicted the universalism of human rights as a product of an ‘overlapping consensus’ between diverse political, religious and economic systems.67
The Saudi Arabian delegate, Jamil Baroody, criticised Chang’s ecumenical position, arguing that the UDHR was ‘based largely on Western patterns of culture, which were frequently at variance with the patterns of culture of Eastern states’.68 Today, the argument that human rights are a ‘Western construct with limited applicability’ to the non-Western world (as a highly influential article put it), is often depicted as a product of the turn towards autocracy in postcolonial states.69 In the 1940s, however, Baroody and others already suspected that the new human rights language could become a means for coercive interventions into non-Western societies. With far less faith than Chang that human rights could be detached from ethnocentrism and civilisational hierarchies, Baroody anticipated more recent criticisms of the ‘dominant influence of Western liberal thought and philosophies’ on the key human rights texts.70
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It was challenges from outside Europe, more than the often-cited post-war loss of faith among Europeans in their own civilisation, that helped rid the UDHR of the language of civilisation. It is commonly argued that wartime atrocities made legal distinctions between civilised and uncivilised societies anachronistic.71 From this perspective, the UDHR’s affirmations of human equality indicated that chastened European powers had renounced racial and civilisational hierarchies in favour of universal humanism. But the view that the horrors of the war destabilised the distinction between the civilised and the uncivilised tacitly accepts that only atrocities committed against Europeans, and not colonial genocide, massacre and slavery, were sufficient to render European claims to civilisational superiority suspect. Two years after the adoption of the UDHR, the Martiniquian poet and politician Aimé Césaire argued that ‘the very distinguished, very humanistic, very Christian bourgeois’ is unable to forgive the Nazis not for the ‘crime against man’ as such, but rather for ‘the crime against the white man … and the fact that he applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the coolies of India, and the blacks of Africa’.72 Césaire charged what he termed ‘pseudo-humanism’ with promoting a conception of the rights of man that was fragmented, limited, narrow and ‘sordidly racist’.73 This conception of rights still maintained its hold during the drafting of the UDHR, as delegates from colonial powers sought to preserve civilisational hierarchies and colonial rule in the face of a variety of challenges.
For the neoliberals, the very attempt to find an international, cross-cultural consensus on a list of human rights was a profound mistake. In contrast to the model of elite moral authority mobilised by the League of Nations’ mandate process, they viewed the UN as a false bureaucratic unity at odds with the spiritual unity of Europe.74 Europe, Röpke argued, is ‘more than catch-words, rhetoric and an empty excuse for conferences’; its ‘spiritual heritage’ of Greek culture, Christianity, individual freedom and economic freedom made it ‘the home of humanity, tolerance, reason and religion veneration’.75 For the neoliberals, the horrors of World War II were not a product of Western civilisation, but the results of the collectivist challenge to the liberalism that had previously defined it. They depicted civilisation as the product of the spread of commerce and the division of labour and a moral order that facilitated the pursuit of individual interest and trade. This meant that any restriction of trade was a civilisational regression – a return from the morals of the market to the egalitarianism and shared purposes of what Hayek described as a tribal morality.
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Ludwig von Mises’s Market Civilisation
In March 1938, the Gestapo ransacked the apartment of the leading Austrian School economist Ludwig von Mises, confiscating twenty-one boxes of papers and sealing the apartment behind them. Two years later, Mises, who had initially left Vienna for Rappard’s Institute for International Affairs, fled Europe altogether for the United States.76 He wrote to Hayek that he was reluctantly saying ‘adieu to a Europe about to disappear forever’.77 A decade earlier, Mises had been cautiously optimistic that fascist movements had saved Europe from the crisis of Bolshevism. ‘It cannot be denied that Fascism and similar movements aiming at the establishment of dictatorships are full of the best intentions and that their intervention has, for the moment, saved European civilization’, he wrote – adding that the ‘merit that Fascism has thereby won for itself will live on eternally in history’.78 Although he warned that fascism was no more than an ‘emergency makeshift’, he stressed that it emerged not among ‘barbarians’, as had Bolshevism, but in Europe, where ‘the intellectual and moral heritage of some thousands of years of civilization cannot be destroyed at one blow’.79 Fascist movements would therefore always remain under the influence of liberalism, he predicted and, once the indignation at Bolshevik ‘murders and atrocities’ had passed, fascism would become more ‘moderate’.80
When this Jewish liberal intellectual ultimately abandoned Europe to the Nazis, this did not dent his faith in the inextricable relation between the competitive market and civilisation, but it did signal the end of an era in the development of neoliberalism. Mises’s private seminar, held between 1920 and 1934 in his office in the Vienna Chamber of Commerce, was formative for a generation of neoliberal thinkers, among them Hayek, the philosopher Alfred Schütz, and the prominent economists Gottfried Haberler and Fritz Machlup.81 One day, as Mises looked out of the window of his chamber offices onto Vienna’s opulent grand boulevard (Ringstrasse), he told Machlup, ‘Maybe grass will grow there, because our civilization will end’.82 Mises was first among the MPS members to devote sustained attention to the problem of civilisation. By 1946, when Hayek proposed the formation of a new liberal institute, Mises could argue that ‘eminent citizens’ had been attempting to prevent civilisation’s demise and stem the tide of totalitarianism for more than sixty years.83
For the Austrian milieu that nourished Mises and Hayek, the entire twentieth century was marked by decline. Mises came of age in Vienna under the multi-ethnic and supranational Austro-Hungarian Empire. In 1871, when the economist Carl Menger wrote what became the founding text of the Austrian School of economics, Principles of Economics, only 4 per cent of the population of Vienna were eligible to vote. They used their voting power to support liberal reforms, including freedoms of speech, assembly, religion and faith, as well as academic freedom.84 Mises acknowledged later that the Liberal Party’s position in the House of Deputies was not due to popular support; rather, the liberals benefited from an electoral system that privileged the upper middle class and the intelligentsia, and ‘withheld the right to vote from the masses’.85 The fatal contradiction of the Liberal Party, he suggested, was that it was a supposedly democratic party with a pronounced ‘aversion to democracy’.86 Writing in the immediate aftermath of World War I, he attributed that party’s ruin to the specific circumstances of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. But the fatal contradiction he identified was not confined to central Europe nor to the nineteenth century. Neoliberalism too combined a defence of liberal democracy with anxiety that unrestrained democracy threatened the liberal economic order.
Like his contemporaries Raphael Lemkin (1900–59), who initiated the Genocide Convention, and Hersch Lauterpacht (1897–1960), who pioneered the legal concepts of the ‘crime against humanity’ and transnational human rights, Mises grew up in Lemberg (today the major Ukrainian city of Lviv/Lwów), on the border of the Russian Empire. Mises came from a modernising assimilated Jewish family, and strongly identified with what he saw as the civilising influence of the Habsburg Empire’s German elite, whose culture was often depicted as ‘fertilizer for an otherwise barren east’.87
Writing in the immediate wake of World War I, he noted that, until the mid nineteenth century, Germans in the Habsburg Empire had taken their cultural superiority and dominance for granted; ‘Whoever rose became German’, he wrote.88 When the Empire’s other nationalities rejected this civilising path and demanded national independence, it was a painful realisation for the liberal German milieu. From this point on, they threw their support behind the monarchy, Mises recounted, and rejected demands for national autonomy and democratisation, which would have subjected Germans to the rule of Slavic majorities.89
Faced with the breakup of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the wake of World War I, and the rise of social democracy and then fascism, the Austrian School neoliberals were preoccupied with what another resident of Vienna, the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, identified in the title of his Civilization and Its Discontents (1930). Freud saw his contemporaries’ hostility to civilisation as originating in the revolt of ‘the primitive roots of the personality still unfettered by civilizing influences’ against the discipline and constraint of civilisation.90 For Mises and his fellow Austrian School members, the restraint most essential to civilisation was submission to the demands of the market. They believed that, in creating a web of mutually beneficial relations, commerce was civilising, and that the most civilised peoples were therefore those with the most extensive division of labour. For Mises, the ‘destiny of modern civilization as developed by the white peoples in the last two hundred years is inseparably linked with the fate of economic science’.91 Although Mises criticised the metaphysical ideas of constant progress, he identified a form of compulsion at work in the division of labour. It was always in the interests of the most ‘advanced’ societies to draw others into the web of social cooperation, both in the interests of greater productivity and because such cooperation fostered peace, he argued. The outbreak of World War I brutally shattered ‘the dream of an ecumenical society’ that Mises had believed was heralded by the ‘opening up of the backward regions of the Near and Far East, of Africa and America’ and the extension of the world market.92
In conceptualising a civilised society as a market society with a highly developed division of labour, Mises drew on the thought of Adam Smith, whom he credited with the discovery of the eternal law of social evolution that every civilisation must follow if it is not to fall back into barbarism.93 Mises placed himself within in a tradition that stretched back to the Baron de Montesquieu’s belief that commerce ‘polishes and softens [adoucit] barbarian ways’, which informed Scottish Enlightenment thinkers, including Smith and Adam Ferguson, for whom the history of civil society was one of slow and gradual progression from the ‘rude and infant state’ of unsettled tribes, to the industry, arts, sciences and class divisions of ‘polished’ commercial nations.94 This reference to the polishing function of commerce is likely to be the root of the term ‘polished nations’, which the Scots used to refer to civilised, commercial nations, in contrast to ‘rude’ ones.95 In Ferguson’s great Essay on the History of Civil Society, a polished nation is defined by its refinement and sensibility as well as its commerce, division of labour and wealth. The idea that commerce was civilising gave impetus to the dichotomy later expressed under the oppositions ‘civilised-uncivilised’, ‘advanced-backward’, and ‘developed-undeveloped’.96
In appropriating this tradition, Mises portrayed civilisation as inextricably economic and racial. While he rejected the biological racism of the French eugenicist Arthur de Gobineau, Mises sought to rescue its ‘germ’ for a ‘modern’ race theory that ascribed racial hierarchies to an evolutionary process that gave certain races ‘so long a lead that members of other races could not overtake them within a limited time’.97 The North American political scientist Adolph Reed Jr and others have emphasised the historical variance of racial classifications and the narratives that elaborate them.98 For Mises, what distinguished races was not only an inequality of intelligence and willpower, but also an unequal ability to form societies based on an extensive division of labour. The ‘better races’, he argued, have a special aptitude for social cooperation through the market. Consequently, the ‘peoples who have developed the system of the market economy and cling to it are in every respect superior to all other peoples’.99 While he sought to show that all races derive advantages from cooperation, he also contended that so-called inferior races could only progress by protecting private property and individual rights, adopting an extensive division of labour, and adapting themselves to the margin of freedom enabled by a market society.100
While he rejected the natural-law belief in human equality, Mises embraced individual rights as key components of the liberal heritage. Mises contrasted ‘Western man’ – ‘entirely a being adjusted to life in freedom and formed in freedom’ – with the ‘Asiatics’, who he depicted as the apathetic inhabitants of stagnant societies.101 While Adam Smith had based a similar judgment of China on its refusal of foreign trade, Mises attributed the disintegration of the once-powerful empires of Japan, India and China to their absence of individual rights. ‘The East’, he claimed, ‘never tried to stress the rights of the individual, against the power of rulers.’102 Deprived of rights, the wealthy were exposed to the resentment of the masses and the permanent threat of expropriation. Mises also believed that the absence of individual rights had made barbaric abuses a matter of course in ‘the East’: ‘slavery, serfdom, untouchability, customs like sutteeism or the crippling of the feet of girls, barbaric punishments, mass misery, ignorance, superstition, and disregard of hygiene’.103 It was the absence of a culture of individual rights, he argued, that attracted the people of the East to socialism.104 In such a picture, the absence of the competitive market economy was inseparable from violations of freedom and bodily integrity, while socialism was aligned with footbinding and slavery. ‘Freedom is indivisible’, Mises remarked, and so preventing such practices required a competitive market underpinned by a system of individual rights.105
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