Human Rights in Pinochet’s Chile: The Dethronement of Politics 14 страница
During the drafting of the UDHR, the UK was still concerned to ensure that no proclamation of rights interfered with its capacity to wield such despotism throughout its Empire. Hayek, in contrast, set himself against Mill’s belief that, until people were capable of being guided by conviction or persuasion, ‘there is nothing for them but implicit obedience to an Akbar or Charlemagne, if they are so fortunate to find one’.50 In Hayek’s view, the assumption that people must be morally autonomous before they can be free reversed the order of priority between morality and freedom; only in a free society could people act on their own moral convictions, he argued.51 But it was not the civilising mission of Mill, or of the Fabians, per se that offended Hayek and his fellow neoliberals. As we have seen, they had their own project of spreading civilisation across the globe. What they objected to most in social democratic colonialism was not the colonialism but the social democracy. Mill was responsible for the idea of social justice, Hayek argued, and and his influence had consequently ‘done a great deal of harm,52 In Mises’s estimation, Mill was ‘the great advocate of socialism’ in comparison with whom ‘all other socialist writers – even Marx, Engels, and Lassalle – are scarcely of any importance.’53 The interventionism and socialism of Mill’s disciples on the British left was evidence of the perniciousness of these developments. ‘Fabian and Keynesian “unorthodoxy”’, Mises warned hyperbolically, ‘resulted in a confused acceptance of the tenets of Nazism.’54 Against this Fabian colonial vision, the neoliberals developed their own critique of colonialism. At mid-century, they still hoped that independence from colonial rule could mark the return to a liberal world order.
Imperialism and the Sweetness of Commerce
In 1927 Ludwig von Mises published a scathing attack on European colonialism, which he described as antithetical to all the principles of liberalism. Mises traced modern imperialism to the 1870s, when the industrial countries had abandoned free trade in order to compete for colonial markets in Africa and Asia. More than twenty years later, the Belgian delegate to the United Nations was still defending his country’s record in this period by arguing that Belgium had not forcibly conquered the Congo, but freed it from the ‘scourge of the slave trade … at very considerable sacrifice to itself’.55 Mises flatly rejected such arguments. The basic idea of colonial policy in this period, he argued, was to take advantage of the superior weaponry of the ‘white race’ to subjugate, rob and enslave weaker peoples. But, even as he criticised colonial imperialism, Mises argued that the British Empire was different; she pursued ‘grand commercial objectives’, he argued, and her free-trade policies benefited her colonial subjects and the whole world.56
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Writing with a nervous eye on rising anticolonial movements from India to the Philippines, Mises warned that, if independence damaged the integration of the colonies in global circuits of trade, it would be ‘an economic catastrophe of hitherto unprecedented proportion’.57 Despite his liberal scruples about coercive rule, he believed that political independence was of minor significance compared to the future of an international market civilisation. ‘European officials, troops, and police must remain in these areas’, he wrote,
as far as their presence is necessary in order to maintain the legal and political conditions required to insure the participation of the colonial territories in international trade. It must be possible to carry on commercial, industrial, and agricultural operations in the colonies, to exploit mines, and to bring the products of the country, by rail and river, to the coast and thence to Europe and America. That all this should continue to be possible is in the interest of everyone, not only of the inhabitants of Europe, America, and Australia, but also of the natives of Asia and Africa themselves.58
Writing during World War II, Mises predicted that the establishment of a United Nations would lead to autonomy for the people of Africa and Asia, but insisted that ‘there are today no such things as internal affairs of a country which do not concern the rest of mankind’.59 If anti-imperialism in the colonies developed into anti-capitalism, Mises and his fellow neoliberals believed, it would be a catastrophe for all of humanity.
To forestall this possibility, the neoliberals sought to transform popular understandings of imperialism. Their aim was to refute the contention, made popular by J. A. Hobson’s influential 1902 text Imperialism: A Study, that imperialism was a product of market capitalism. Hobson had attributed imperialism, which he distinguished from the establishment of settler-colonies, to manufacturers, investors and financiers engaged in a ‘cut-throat struggle’ for new markets and investments.60 Rejecting the idea that nations exist in a Hobbesian state of nature marked by a war of all against all, Hobson argued elsewhere that it was only because ‘the power of the people is usurped by bosses’ that international relations were marked by conflict and strife.61 Hobson attributed the imbalance between production and consumption that drove the imperialist competition for new markets to the weak consuming power of the working classes of the imperialist countries. Imperialism, in this picture, was the fruit of unequal economic distribution at home, and would only be overcome by domestic social reform to lift the living standards of the poor.
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Hobson’s study raised a question that continued to be posed by critics of imperialism across the next century: If imperialism was the result of the ‘selfish interests of certain industrial, financial and professional classes’, he asked, then why did it garner such broad support?62 His answer was that imperialists attached themselves to those movements that portrayed themselves as doing good in the world, and represented their own motives in humanitarian terms. In Britain, he noted, there existed a substantial minority with ‘a genuine desire to spread Christianity among the heathens, to diminish the cruelty and other sufferings which they believe exist in countries less fortunate than their own, and to do good work about the world in the cause of humanity’.63 Hobson did not question the sincerity of what he framed as these ‘disinterested’ aims, but did argue that imperialists latch onto these elevated sentiments in order to create a ‘moral justification’ for their actions.64 The combination of strong interested forces with weak disinterested ones, he wrote, ‘is the homage which imperialism pays to humanity’.65
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It was Hobson’s association of imperialism with commercial interests that the neoliberals set out to displace. This became more urgent when Vladimir Lenin went beyond Hobson’s ‘bourgeois social reformism’ to define imperialism as the ‘highest stage of capitalism’.66 Writing in 1916, Lenin described imperialism as a phenomenon of monopoly capitalism, with its territorial division of the world between financial and industrial cartels and competing imperial blocs. Lenin indicted monopoly and violence as the reality lurking behind the myth of peaceful, mutually beneficial exchange. As capitalism developed, he argued, the concentration of production and capital led to the transformation of free competition into monopoly. Far from creating peaceful international relations of mutual understanding and benefit, the Bolshevik theoretician contended, war and Great Power rivalry were endemic to capitalism. Lenin reserved his greatest scorn for those who predicted a further stage of ‘ultra-imperialism’ in which a union of imperialist powers would come together in a single political entity, whereby ‘wars shall cease under capitalism’.67 For Lenin, the dream of perpetual peace, which continued to animate mid-century neoliberalism, would remain a dream for as long as capitalism persisted.
The neoliberals sought to rescue capitalism from the charge that it led to war and violence. Imperialism, they argued, was a product of politics and the pursuit of national glory, not of capitalism. As early as 1919, the Austrian School economist Joseph Schumpeter (a participant in Mises’s private seminar) rejected Marxist arguments, defining imperialism as an atavistic remnant of absolutist autocracy. Inverting the sweetness-of-commerce thesis, Schumpeter argued that the beneficial effects of capitalism had been inhibited by the persistence of pre-capitalist institutions and attitudes.68 Capitalism, Schumpeter argued, directs the productive energies once spent on wars of conquest into productive labour, and a ‘purely capitalist world therefore can offer no fertile soil to imperialist impulses’.69 The more capitalist social relations penetrated the economy and the mind, he argued, the more anti-imperialism and pacifism would thrive. The problem was not capitalism itself, but the fact that it had not been strong enough to alter decisively the social structure or mentality of the pre-capitalist age, with its ‘disaster-bound addiction to heroic antics’.70
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Just as figures like the Baron de Montesquieu and James Steuart had argued that commerce was sweet and pacifying – in an age when the slave trade was at its peak, and when ‘trade in general was still a hazardous, adventurous and often violent business’ – the neoliberals of the twentieth century sought to sanitise the capitalism of their time.71 An unrestricted competitive market, they argued, would replace violent conflicts over territory and resources with peaceful and mutually beneficial commerce. The cause of conflict, they argued, lay elsewhere – in the politicisation of the economy and the confusion between political sovereignty and the ownership of a territory’s natural resources.
This argument was made with the greatest force by the British economist Lionel Robbins, in a series of lectures at William Rappard’s Geneva Institute of Graduate Studies. In 1939, as another war broke out in Europe, Robbins challenged Lenin’s argument that the previous Great War was an imperialist war – ‘an annexationist, predatory, war of plunder’ for the division of the world and ‘the partition and repartition of colonies’.72 Robbins depicted war as inimical to a ‘Great Society’ based on private property and the division of labour, and finance capital as a pawn of government, not a prime mover.73 In geopolitical matters, he argued, bankers are a ‘pacific influence’.74 If war was contrary to the interests of capital, Robbins argued its cause lay elsewhere – in politics, and especially in the existence of independent sovereign states. ‘Not capitalism’, Robbins argued, ‘but the anarchic political organization of the world is the root disease of our civilization.’ Imperialism, from this perspective, was a result of the abandonment of free trade, and of liberalism’s ‘strict distinctions between territory and property’.75
Röpke, who was in the audience during Robbin’s lecture and enjoyed it ‘tremendously’, borrowed terms from Roman law to define this vision of liberal peace.76 A liberal economy, he argued, separates imperium from dominium, ownership from sovereignty, and therefore prevents conflicts over resources. Referring back to the liberalism of David Hume and Adam Smith, he described the (old) liberal principle as that of the ‘thorough separation between the spheres of the government and of economy, between sovereignty and the apparatus which provides material goods, between the Imperium and the Dominium, between the political power and the economic power’.77 It was a central article of faith for the neoliberal thinkers that a state that rules an area rich in natural resources does not own those materials, which are owned by private individuals who may enter into mutually beneficial relations for their sale. Multilateral relations of trade allow industrial nations to obtain raw materials by running their export chains through several countries, neutralising state borders and making the political rule of regions rich in resources unnecessary, Röpke argued.78 The goal, as Quinn Slobodian puts it in his striking account of neoliberal ‘globalism’, was a liberal world in which ‘nobody would mistake the lines on the map for meaningful marks in the world of dominium’.79
For the neoliberals, it was the confusion of sovereignty with ownership that made territorial control the precondition of economic exploitation and led to international conflict. Once states take over the ownership of the materials within their border, Robbins argued, ‘the distinction between territorial jurisdiction and property disappears and, for that very reason, the fact of geographical inequality becomes a permanent cause of disharmony’.80 He once again contrasted this situation with the free trade of the old British Empire, in which, for ‘cultivated Britons’, the ‘dominions of the empire’ were a ‘ceremonial fiction’, not a concrete reality; in a free-trade economy based on the principle of the open door, any private investor can buy a country’s raw materials on the market on equal terms, he argued, and so has no need to resort to conquest.81 Mises put the same point more concretely: ‘It is of no advantage for an English buyer of Australian wool that Australia is part of the British Empire; he must pay the same price that his Italian or German competitor pays.’82
In depicting the British Empire as peaceful, Robbins obscured not only the great naval force that ensured its supremacy over its rivals, but also the genocidal violence wielded against indigenous and First Nations peoples in the process of establishing its distinctive white-settler colonies. Also absent from his narrative was what Mike Davis refers to as the ‘late Victorian holocausts’ by which British exploitation and commitment to Malthusian doctrines and free trade dramatically exacerbated the effects of climate to produce extraordinary famines, notably in India.83 In praising the peaceful trade of the British Empire, he engaged in an imperial politics of ‘deflection’ that turned attention away from empire’s violence by insisting on its fundamental liberality.84
Mises was more explicit about the brutal state violence necessary to uphold ‘peaceful’ commerce. He justified the wars waged by England to expand her empire by arguing that, had India and China not been forcefully opened to trade, not only ‘each Chinese and each Hindu, but also each European and each American would be considerably worse off’.85 Depicting the extension of the international division of labour as being in the interests of all of humanity, he argued that developed nations could not remain indifferent to those who wished to maintain their independence at a lower level of civilisation. Mises developed a ‘just war’ argument for postcolonial times: any country that deprived others of access to its natural resources did an injury to all of humanity, he argued, and could legitimately be compelled to trade.86
On these grounds, he praised the Opium Wars that had ‘opened’ China to British trade; ‘no barriers ought to be put in the way even of the trade in poisons’, he argued, it being up to each individual to restrain himself.87 The unequal and extraterritorial treaties imposed on China established a precursor for neoliberal forms of empire ‘predicated on legally protected freedom of trade without formal territorial control’.88 In a different context, the challenge for the neoliberals was to conceptualise the institutional and legal conditions that would compel postcolonial states to offer their resources on the market’s terms.
Neoliberalism and the ‘Taming of the State’
Although the neoliberals harked back to an earlier era of free trade, they also broke with the laissez-faire anti-imperialism of nineteenth-century liberalism and its assumption that free trade would naturally lead to harmony. Writing during World War II, Mises argued that, while earlier liberals had correctly recognised that there could be no conflicts between correctly understood interests, they had drastically overestimated the ability of the masses to understand their own interests. In typically aristocratic mode, he argued that liberalism had failed because ‘most men are too dull to follow complex chains of reasoning’. If even the Germans had proved incapable of recognising that their interests lay in market competition, not conquest, he despaired, ‘how can we expect that the Hindus, the worshippers of the cow, should grasp the theories of Ricardo and of Bentham?’89 Just as Rappard had pointed out that Smith’s economic argument for free trade presupposed a distinctly Scottish homo economicus, Mises contended that the success of a liberal market relied on an institutional and legal order that would shape liberal subjects. ‘The essential feature of the advanced West was not its technique’, he wrote (in terms that resonated with Charles Malik’s arguments at Lake Success), ‘but its moral atmosphere’; a competitive market would thrive only in a society that encouraged saving, entrepreneurship, and peaceful competition.90
The question for the neoliberals was how to secure a legal and institutional structure that would foster the moral environment on which an international division of labour depended. In seeking to answer this, they drew on the experiments in international governance and supervision pursued by Rappard and the Permanent Mandates Commission, and by the earlier British Empire, which Mises depicted as a ‘mandatory of European Civilization’.91 In the wake of World War II, the challenge for the neoliberals was how to provide new standards of civilisation for a world of independent states. They believed that world commerce required binding legal standards to protect traders, and prevent confiscations and discriminatory treatment of non-nationals. Judged by ‘Western standards’, Robbins wrote, ‘the appeals of traders and investors for protection against arbitrary confiscation, discriminating justice and administrative corruption, have often had much justification’.92 Faced with growing anticolonial movements, the neoliberals sought to ensure that political self-determination did not enable the people of the former colonies to claim their natural resources as their own property or subject them to political control.
While states were necessary to enforce labour discipline and security, and create the conditions for market competition, they had to be shielded from the demands of their own people and prevented from interfering with the market. As Hayek put it, the ‘taming of the savage’ must be followed by the ‘taming of the state’.93 What was necessary was ‘a set of rules which define what a state may do, and an authority capable of enforcing these rules’.94 It was essential that the post-war period avoid a return to ‘unfettered sovereignty’ – especially in former colonies.95 Here, the neoliberals were broadly in agreement, but they were still grappling with the question of what those rules would look like, and how they would be enforced. They were nonetheless clear that the problem of securing a liberal economy was not a technical one, and that the new order would need to amount to more than economic rules. Mises contended that the preconditions of an international economy were ‘social, legal, constitutional and political’.96 Röpke stipulated that a truly international economic order must be based on ‘fundamental liberty and equality of rights’.97 Against economic autarky, the neoliberals sought to develop a moral order for all humanity. ‘No human cooperation and no lasting peace are conceivable’, Mises concluded, ‘if men put loyalty to any particular group above loyalty to humanity, moral law, and the principle of every individual’s moral responsibility and autonomy.’98
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