Human Rights in Pinochet’s Chile: The Dethronement of Politics 13 страница
The period that separated the adoption of the UDHR in 1948 from the adoption of the human rights covenants in 1966 seems at first to have been a period of just such cascading rights claims. Victorious anti-colonial movements drastically changed both the composition of the UN and the terms of human rights debates. In 1955, delegates from twenty-nine African and Asian countries gathered at Bandung in Indonesia, and declared that the right of peoples and nations to self-determination is ‘a pre-requisite for the full enjoyment of all fundamental Human Rights’.5 Two years later, in 1957, Ghana became the first sub-Saharan African nation to win its independence; in 1960, dubbed the ‘Year of Africa’, it was followed by seventeen more African nations, including Nigeria, whose delegate was so proud to participate in the drafting of the human rights covenants. Much had changed since the early days of the drafting of the UDHR, when delegates from colonial powers had sought to defend civilisational hierarchies and exclude their colonial subjects from human rights.
Yet, even as what Hunt terms the ‘bulldozer force of the revolutionary logic of rights’ was in full gear, anticolonialists were recognising that their new-found freedom and sovereign equality did not grant them the independence for which they had fought.6 Just prior to the adoption of the human rights covenants, Kwame Nkrumah, the first president of independent Ghana, coined the termed ‘neo-colonialism’ to refer to the subtle mechanisms that perpetuated colonial patterns of exploitation in the wake of formal independence. Nkrumah argued that the achievement of formal sovereignty had neither freed former colonies from the unequal economic relations of the colonial period nor given them political control over their territories. A ‘state in the grip of neo-colonialism’, he wrote, ‘is not master of its own destiny’,7 Among the mechanisms of neocolonialism, Nkrumah singled out international capital’s control of the world market, exploitative uses of international aid and aid conditionality, and the moral pressure exerted by US labour organisations, missionaries and NGOs.8 Neocolonialism emerged, as Upendra Baxi has noted, just as struggles for independence appeared to succeed.9 The struggle against neocolonialism took the form of new demands for economic rights, including rights to development and to ‘Permanent Sovereignty Over Natural Resources’.10
For the neoliberals, this attempt to politicise the postcolonial economic order was a threat to the world market and international peace. They argued that this postcolonial economic project was the inheritance of mid-century colonialism, which had abandoned the free-trade policies of the earlier British Empire in favour of economic planning. Faced with rising anticolonialism, the neoliberals sought to change the terms of the debate over imperialism and colonialism. They argued that imperialism was not the ‘highest stage of capitalism’, as Vladimir Lenin had argued, but the result of the politicisation of the economy. Summing up the shared neoliberal perspective, Wilhelm Röpke complained that imperialism was one of the ‘sad results of the politicization of the economy into which we lapse the more we increasingly abandon the principles of the market economy’.11 Against postcolonial demands for economic self-determination, the neoliberals mobilised their dichotomy between the market as a realm of mutually beneficial, free, peaceful exchange, and politics as violent, coercive and militaristic. Separating political sovereignty from economic ownership, they argued, would enable all parties to purchase the raw materials of former colonies on the open market, rendering colonisation and conquest unnecessary.
|
|
|
At the 1957 meeting of the Mont Pèlerin Society, the Stanford agricultural economist Karl Brandt drew on the myth of the market as a catallaxy that transforms enemies into friends to lay out a neoliberal approach to decolonisation. The problem for an ‘enlightened liberalism’, he argued, was not ‘how to rid the colonial areas of the white people’; rather, it was ‘how to create, as soon as possible, conditions in the colonial areas under which the white people not only can stay but where more of them can enter the areas as welcome partners and friends’.12 Creating the conditions in which ‘the white people’ could stay meant ensuring that their rights were protected. Breaking with the optimism of nineteenth-century laissez-faire, the neoliberals argued that the future of the world market depended on the creation of a legal and moral framework to restrain postcolonial sovereignty, protect property and investments, and secure the existing international division of labour. Against the postcolonial human rights project, the neoliberals developed a competing human rights project – ‘market-friendly’ human rights, which aimed to protect the right to trade, and to license transformative interventions to uphold this right.13 More importantly, neoliberal human rights were designed to inculcate the morals of the market and shape liberal subjects. What Nkrumah called neocolonialism was, for the neoliberals, a project.
|
|
|
Social Democratic Colonialism and the Problem of Human Rights
In 1947, the Labour government that built the UK’s welfare state sent its delegate to Lake Success with instructions to ensure the new human rights declaration contained no social and economic rights.14 Charles Dukes, the retired trade unionist representing the UK, presented his country as a bastion of freedom, social justice and equality. At the same time, he was tasked with deflecting challenges to Britain’s colonial empire, which then comprised thirty-eight territories with a combined population of 60 million people.15 The Colonial Office viewed the drafting of an international human rights document as a serious threat. Wary of the Foreign Office’s enthusiasm for the Cold War potential of human rights, a 1947 Colonial Office memo warned that the UK should not commit to a conception of human rights based too closely on the political and social conditions of ‘advanced Europeanized countries’; if such a conception were accepted, the memo warned, ‘(attractive as this might be for “having a go at the totalitarians”) we shall expose our colonial flank’.16
The fear of exposing its ‘colonial flank’ shaped the approach to the drafting of the UDHR taken by the UK and by the other major colonial power, France. Dukes was instructed in the Colonial Office position: ‘colonial status is not a cause of backwardness; it is a remedy’.17 The Colonial Office stipulated five prerequisites for self-government: a healthy and vigorous people; adequate technical skill and knowledge; adequate production; a commodity for export; and, finally, honest and efficient administration and governance.18 This represented a turn away from the free trade of the nineteenth-century British Empire, as the state took on direct responsibility for economic development. From the neoliberals, there was little to defend in this social democratic colonialism. They watched with horror as the ‘totalitarian’ social democracy they had condemned at home was exported to the former colonies. Before turning to their response, it is worth considering in more detail the contours of the social democratic colonialism against which they developed their own understanding of the world market and the rights it entailed.
|
|
|
Less than a decade after the UDHR’s adoption, the Swedish social democrat Gunnar Myrdal proclaimed that the welfare state, which was becoming a reality in all ‘advanced nations’, should be transformed into a ‘welfare world’.19 This dream was undercut by the reality of colonial exploitation. The same year that the UDHR was adopted, the UK’s minister of economic affairs, Sir Stafford Cripps, contended that Britain’s very survival depended on ‘a quick and extensive development of our African resources’.20 The demand to increase production in the colonies made the UK very wary of extending economic rights. For anticolonialists, who were accustomed to the gap between universal pronouncements and colonial realities, the seeming contradiction between welfarism at home and the denial of economic rights at an international level provided a lens through which to illuminate the post-war economic order.
It was Nkrumah who grasped most clearly that the colonies were not simply an exception to the extension of social welfare and rights. Colonial exploitation, he argued, constituted the condition of possibility for economic rights in the metropolis. Faced with popular expectations that the end of the war would be marked by welfare and higher living standards, he argued that ‘no post-war capitalist country could survive unless it became a “welfare state”’.21 As a greater share of the proceeds of colonial exploitation were redirected to the working classes in the interests of social pacification, the Ghanaian President noted, two principles central to early capitalism were sacrificed: the subjugation of the working classes within each country, and the exclusion of state control of capitalist enterprise. Nkrumah argued that substituting free trade with welfare states exported class struggle to the international stage and made colonial exploitation newly central to the stability of capitalism.22 The colonies were not simply latecomers to the welfare world. If there was no ‘rights cascade’ when it came to social and economic rights, this was, not least, because the exploitation of the colonies made these rights possible in the metropolis.
|
|
|
In the decades leading up to the drafting of the UDHR, strikes and labour disputes across the Caribbean and the African continent forced colonial officials to deal with questions of labour and living standards. Despite the arguments of the UK Treasury, which warned against creating a colonial ‘dole’, the Colonial Office successfully won passage of the Colonial Development and Welfare Act (1940), which enabled metropolitan spending on water, health, housing and education in the colonies.23 The act was predicated on a social theory that assumed improved standards of living and social services would succeed in ‘cooling colonial anger and restoring imperial honour’.24 This gave a progressive gloss to colonial rule, as state supervision and planning were portrayed as necessary to protect the people of the colonies from market fluctuations. The reality, in the context of the war, was starkly different: real wages in African cities were plummeting, and colonial governments were more focused on lifting productivity than on raising the living standards of the people they governed.25 In such a context, colonial powers were particularly wary about international declarations of human rights.
Fabianising the Empire
By 1947, when the drafting of the UDHR began, the UK Labour government had begun what the Labour Party’s Tribune newspaper called ‘Fabianising the Empire’. Established in 1884 with the goal of reconstructing British society to secure ‘the general welfare and happiness’, by the twentieth century the Fabians had turned their attention from ‘civilising’ the British working class to developing the Empire. In 1926, the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky had described the Fabian Society as an anachronism of the Victorian era, when the ‘benevolent bourgeoisie’ did cultural and educational work among the poor.26 The neoliberals were no more complimentary. Hayek, who taught at the Fabian-founded London School of Economics, reflected that his Fabian colleague Harold Laski was ‘frightfully offended’ by The Road to Serfdom, which he believed was written specifically against him.27 Laski was not entirely mistaken. Hayek wrote the book with one clear purpose, he recalled later: to persuade his ‘Fabian colleagues that they were wrong’.28 In the book itself, he criticised the imperialism of the Fabians, arguing that their enthusiasm for planning went along with a veneration of large states and a ‘glorification of power’ that was akin to that of the Nazis.29
As the UDHR was drafted, the Fabian Colonial Bureau was the main vehicle for the UK’s ‘progressive’ colonial policy, and it was against this Fabian imperialism that the neoliberals would develop their own response to the question of the colonies. For the Fabians, colonial development was too important to be left to the market; the benevolent hand of the state was necessary to secure order and prepare colonial subjects for the demands of an efficient modern economy. For the neoliberals, in contrast, mid-twentieth-century colonial policy represented a dangerous step away from the liberalism and free trade of the earlier British Empire. In the Fabian commitment to economic planning, they saw the politicisation of the economy and a cause of international friction and imperialist conflict. Much later, neoliberal development economists would look back on this period and argue that, at independence, post-colonial leaders were ‘handed a system of close economic controls which placed the bulk of the population at their mercy’.30 In the British government’s embrace of economic planning, the neoliberals discerned the origins of postcolonial ‘totalitarianism’.
The social democratic imperialism of the late 1940s sought legitimacy in the claim that it was lifting living standards in the colonies. Once again, the ILO played an important role in what Frederick Cooper calls ‘imperialism internationalized’.31 A founding premise of the ILO was that the failure of any one country to adopt ‘accepted international minimum standards’ was an obstacle to the promotion of such standards in all other countries.32 As an ‘avant-garde of global governance’, the ILO helped to shape a moral discourse and a vision of global order to be administered from Europe.33 It aimed to stabilise the colonies and normalise wage labour through the extension of minimum standards of welfare and labour regulation. This also entailed globalising a normative vision of the family. As ILO officials believed ‘the disruption of family life’ threatened stability, they promoted the phasing out of children’s employment and the regulation of the employment of women, and advised that employers of migratory workers take account of ‘their normal family needs’.34
At the ILO’s 1947 Convention, the Indian workers’ delegate, Shanta Mukherjee, noted the almost total absence of workers from the colonies. ‘Can any policy which has not freedom as its declared objective secure the well-being and happiness of dependent peoples?’, she asked.35 By updating older civilisational and racial hierarchies for new welfarist times, the ‘progressive’ colonial policy of the period sought to forestall such questions. In 1946, Rita Hinden of the Fabian Colonial Bureau clashed with Nkrumah at a conference on the ‘Relation between Britain and the Colonial Peoples’. ‘When Mr Nkrumah said “we want absolute independence”, it left me absolutely cool’, she reflected. ‘British socialists are not so concerned with ideals like independence and self-government, but with the idea of social justice.’36 By taking the emphasis off the political question of independence, the Fabians portrayed colonial rule as necessary to protect colonial subjects from market fluctuations. The year the UDHR was adopted, the Fabian and colonial secretary, Arthur Creech Jones, proclaimed that, with British help, he could see ‘Africans shaking off the shackles of ignorance, superstition and cramping custom, becoming aware and self-reliant and marching with other free people down the great highways of the world to keep their rendezvous with destiny’.37 In drawing on the metaphorics of slavery, Creech Jones portrayed Africans as shackled by their own customs and ignorance, and colonial rule as a force of emancipation.
It was in the context of the Boer War, which pitted the British Empire against the Boer states, the South African Republic (Transvaal) and the Orange Free State, in an attempt to maintain its position in southern Africa, that the Fabians committed themselves to an imperialism stripped of ‘old-fashioned Free Trade talk’.38 The 1900 pamphlet, ‘Fabianism and the Empire’, edited by George Bernard Shaw, embraced this imperialist role, arguing that a ‘Great Power’ like the United Kingdom, must ‘govern in the interests of civilization as a whole’.39 Shaw’s widely discussed pamphlet argued for rescuing the Empire from the ‘strife of classes and private interests’ through effective social organisation. Everywhere the Empire’s ships sailed, it argued, they should bring factory codes and minimum-wage legislation; ‘civilization must follow the flag’.40 In contrast to the neoliberals, the Fabians measured civilisation not by the extent of the division of labour, but by labour regulations and living standards; ‘no flag that does not carry a reasonable standard of life with it shall be the flag of a Great Power’, Shaw wrote.41 This civilising mission aimed to prevent political conflict and class struggle, eradicate disease and crime, and increase the efficiency of colonial production. For the neoliberals, the support of the Fabians for the Boer War was evidence that socialism and imperialism shared what Röpke called a ‘common ideological breeding ground’.42
The Fabians in the Labour government were the inheritors of the utilitarianism and paternalism of the nineteenth-century liberal J. S. Mill, who famously declared that despotism was legitimate in governing those he termed ‘barbarians’ – ‘provided the end be their improvement’.43 Mill’s account of improvement was framed as a critique of a rapacious colonialism of conquest and exploitation practised by ‘selfish usurpers’.44 Equally, the Fabians portrayed themselves as opponents of an older colonialism of exploitation and conquest. But for them, as for Mill, the claim to be preparing the colonised for eventual self-government provided a moral justification for continuing subjugation. Comparing the colonised to children, Mill had argued that different civilisations required different institutions, just as children of different ages required different lessons.45 This pedagogical conception continued to inform British colonial policy into the 1940s. ‘The colonial system’, a UK Colonial Office official told a UN committee in 1947, ‘was a practical illustration of democracy under tuition.’46
The Fabians also inherited Mill’s scepticism about the universalist belief that political institutions suitable for England or France are ‘the only fit form of government for Bedouins and Malays’.47 In 1901, Shaw noted that the British Empire was no longer ‘a Commonwealth of white men and baptised Christians’, and argued against extending democratic institutions to subjects who were ‘black, brown, or yellow’, and whose creed was ‘Mahometan, Buddhist or Hindu’.48 The belief in collective, cultural requirements for civilisation shaped Mill’s account of rights, and went on to influence the Fabians in the Labour government. Following in the utilitarian tradition of Jeremy Bentham, for whom natural rights were ‘nonsense upon stilts’, Mill argued that rights are simply claims that a society should protect in the interests of general utility. In the colonies, there was little utility in granting rights to those who lacked the pre-requisite for liberty: the capacity to improve themselves through reasoned discussion. Rather, he believed it was in the interest of all humanity that the Empire guide the colonised to civilisation, just as a parent guides a child into adulthood. He therefore demarcated those who were ready for rights from those who required a ‘vigorous despotism’ to lead them to a higher level of civilisation.49
Дата добавления: 2021-01-21; просмотров: 79; Мы поможем в написании вашей работы! |
Мы поможем в написании ваших работ!