Human Rights in Pinochet’s Chile: The Dethronement of Politics 15 страница
Making Haste Slowly: The Human Rights Covenants and the Problem of Universalism
As the drafting of the human rights covenants began, less than a year after the adoption of the UDHR, neoliberal fears that postcolonial states would withdraw from the international division of labour seemed exaggerated. The first preoccupation of diplomats from newly independent countries was far more modest: ensuring that the covenants were as universal as the UDHR, which included the unprecedented guarantee that its rights would apply to ‘everyone’, including inhabitants of territories under ‘trust, non-self-governing or under any other limitation of sovereignty’. During the drafting of the UDHR, representatives of the colonial powers had fought hard against the inclusion of this guarantee, even arguing that it was discriminatory to mention colonial subjects specifically as subjects of human rights. Back then, delegates representing colonial powers had spoken forcefully against what the UK delegate called the ‘apparent discrimination’ of ‘especially mentioning the trust and non-self-governing territories’.99 To specify that colonial subjects were subjects of human rights, they argued then, would be to call into question the universality of the category ‘everyone’. Now, faced with drafting a legally binding covenant, delegates of these same states proposed colonial exclusion clauses to prevent the automatic application of the covenants in the territories they controlled. Despite having succeeded in removing references to ‘civilised nations’ from the UDHR, anticolonialists were again forced to challenge metropolitan arguments that colonial subjects lacked the civilisational requirements to be bearers of human rights. Rejoining this challenge, the Soviet delegate Alexei Pavlov argued that his own delegation’s draft covenant, which contained no colonial exclusion clauses, ‘avoided any suspicion of discrimination’ and made it difficult for colonial powers to ‘dodge their obligations’.100
The French delegate René Cassin led the campaign for the colonial clause, arguing that it might not be the most progressive clause that would lead most surely to progress.101 Cassin, a key drafter of the UDHR, is regularly celebrated as a great universalist, but his universalism coexisted with a deep belief in the civilising role of colonial rule, and the legitimacy of violence in sustaining it.102 As the French state jailed nationalist electoral candidates in Algeria and Britain waged violent counterinsurgencies in Palestine and Malaya, both delegations argued for colonial clauses to take account for the fact that the territories under their administration were ‘constantly progressing along the road to self-government and independence’, as the UK delegate put it.103 Cassin too relied on an idea of measured progress to argue that applying covenants automatically to non-self-governing territories would ‘result in a general alignment at the level of the most backward people’, as France could not impose progressive measures that her subjects were unable to understand ‘on account of their attachment to their own traditions’.104
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Prefiguring more contemporary arguments, Cassin singled out France’s North African territories, arguing that Muslim families could not be held to the same standards as families in metropolitan France. Cassin was committed to the view that the rights of man were a Judeo-Christian inheritance, and he saw the status of women as both ‘a marker of a society’s capacity to value and enact human rights and, concurrently, a basis for denying the universal application of human rights in culturally differentiated communities’.105 Transforming the rights of the family, which might take several months in metropolitan France, he argued, would take a long time in the overseas territories, and might ‘endanger public order, since the peoples would not be ready for such changes’.106 Cassin’s argument for slow and steady progress drew a sarcastic response from the Czechoslovakian delegate; the ‘advice to make haste slowly seemed rather reactionary in an era of jet-propelled planes’, he remarked.107
At this point, the anticolonialists were the universalists, and they too spoke in the name of humanity. Rejecting the relevance of cultural difference, they argued that, while colonial clauses may be acceptable in agreements on ‘road traffic, customs duties or narcotic drugs’, they were out of place in a covenant devoted to human rights.108 Women, including women representing countries with Muslim majorities, played a particularly significant role in undercutting Cassin’s paternalistic arguments. Iraq’s delegate, Bedia Afnan, wondered how ‘the degree of evolution of a people could prevent it from enjoying rights’ that Cassin himself had acknowledged were ‘inherent in human nature’. Women had been granted equal rights in Syria, Iraq and Egypt, where ‘the tradition of Islam was allied with political freedom’, she argued, but not in the dependent territories, Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia and Libya.109 For opponents of the colonial clause, it was colonialism, not cultural or religious difference, that was the barrier to the universal extension of human rights.
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Although opponents of the colonial clause rejected Cassin’s advocacy of ‘the instrument of progress, the colonial clause’, they too relied on narratives of progress to depict human rights as civilising technologies.110 Reversing colonial arguments that civilisation was the prerequisite for human rights, they argued that dependent peoples needed human rights in order to progress from what the Belorussian delegate called their ‘backward condition’.111 The ‘fact that certain countries were backward in comparison with others’, the Ethiopian delegate agreed, was not grounds for denying their human rights. Rather, ‘the reason for their backward condition was that their population had for so long been denied the opportunity to enjoy fundamental freedoms’.112 The delegate of the Philippines contested Cassin’s arguments, contending that the ‘right to progress could not be withheld from such peoples just because of their primitive evolution’.113 The Chilean delegate also argued that the ‘low level of civilization’ of a people did not justify the denial of human rights; ‘civilization was not learnt from books’ he stressed. Rather, ‘it could only be learnt by personal experience and … the enjoyment of human rights was the best teacher of the subject’.114
As implied by the Czech delegate’s jest about jet-propelled planes, opponents of the colonial clause sought to accelerate the process of modernisation. In arguing that human rights were prerequisites for civilisation, they accepted the directional account of progress that underpinned colonial civilising claims. On the one hand, they challenged metropolitan arguments that the culture of the colonised constituted an insuperable barrier to the exercise of human rights, and contested the metropolitan prerogative to determine when ‘native’ culture had been sufficiently reformed. On the other hand, they largely accepted the necessity of such reform, and depicted the exercise of human rights as a civilising practice that would promote the modernisation of ‘backward’ or ‘primitive’ peoples.115 Faced with the cultural-relativist arguments of the colonial powers, most opponents of the colonial clause now distanced themselves from the Saudi delegate Jamil Baroody’s earlier warnings that the UDHR was based primarily on Western philosophies and cultural patterns. They accepted, at least rhetorically, the superiority of the self-possessed, modern individual of human rights over the ‘primitive’ native condition. In doing so, they unwittingly prefigured the later repurposing of human rights; in a changed geopolitical context, the civilising mission of human rights would license coercive interventions to remake societies, subjectivities and economies in the interests of global capitalism.
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Alexander Rüstow and the ‘Shabby Remnants of Colonial Imperialism’
At the 1956 meeting of the Mont Pèlerin Society, devoted to ‘The Challenge of Communism and the Response of Liberty’, the German ordoliberal Alexander Rüstow praised the ‘tremendous, epoch-making importance’ of the previous year’s Bandung conference.116 Held in the mountainous West Javan capital, Bandung, in Indonesia, the Asian-African conference was sponsored by the prime ministers of Burma, Ceylon (Sri Lanka), India, Indonesia and Pakistan, all of which had gained their independence during the previous decade. Representatives of twenty-nine countries, representing half the world’s population, travelled to Bandung to build political and economic cooperation. The conference’s final communiqué condemned the racial discrimination and ‘denial of the fundamental rights of man’ in the existing colonies, and declared colonialism in all its manifestations ‘an evil which should speedily be brought to an end’.117 At the same time, it stressed the urgency of economic development, including through foreign capital investment. Even more significantly for those committed to the cause of freedom, Rüstow told his neoliberal colleagues, was that ‘Western colonial imperialism was lined up for comparison with Soviet imperialism’. To draw the advantages of this, he argued, Europe must liquidate its ‘shabby remnants of colonial imperialism’.118
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The Bandung conference, as Rüstow was quick to note, was marked by conflicts about the nature of imperialism and the significance of human rights. Despite the prevalence of the language of anticolonial solidarity, Cold War splits were already evident, and delegates from South Vietnam, Pakistan and Ceylon argued that Soviet colonialism was a greater threat than the European variant. The Iraqi delegate also warned of the danger of jumping ‘from the pan into the fire’, declaring the new imperialism of the Soviet Union to be ‘much deadlier than the old one’. The Pakistani delegate argued against being ‘misled into opening our doors to a new and more insidious form of imperialism that masquerades in the guise of liberation’.119 This Cold War framing also played out in debates about human rights. When Charles Malik proposed that the final communiqué endorse the UDHR, he was supported by many of these same anti-communist states and opposed by China, India, Indonesia and North Vietnam.
The debate at Bandung largely played out within the terms of universalism. Obiora Chinedu Okafor has suggested that ‘the tension between the universality and relativity of human rights (in almost all its shades) was present at Bandung, however subtly.’120 It is nonetheless important to note that, while delegates argued over the legitimacy of the UDHR’s claim to be a ‘common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations’, those who resisted endorsing it largely avoided the language of cultural relativism later made prominent in the so-called ‘Asian-Values Debate’. Instead, they followed the Chinese premier, Zhou Enlai, who pointed out that his country (like many others) had been excluded from the drafting of this ‘universal’ declaration and from the UN (China’s UN seat having been given to Taiwan in the wake of China’s 1949 Communist Revolution).121 Ultimately, this argument was resolved through what Malik considered a ‘very satisfactory’ compromise: the final communiqué ‘took note’ of the UDHR, while condemning colonialism ‘in all its forms’, leaving delegates to interpret this as they wished.122
For Rüstow, all this provided fertile ground for severing anticolonialism from anti-capitalism. Rüstow was distinctive among neoliberal thinkers in the period of decolonisation in his conviction that colonialism was ‘a bloody stain on the historic record of humanity, an endless chain of gravest crime against humanitarianism’. Along with his pragmatic concerns about the propaganda value the Soviets were drawing from European colonialism, he grounded his critique in natural law, which he depicted as ‘the legal armory of the struggle for freedom and human rights’. Singling out the cruelty of the Spanish conquistadores, he denounced the sharp contrast between their ‘unrestrained bestiality’ and their ‘professions of Christianity and the values of their Western civilization’.123 Challenging the rhetoric of the civilising mission, he denounced the colonial powers for trampling on the ‘human dignity of the colonial peoples’, and labelled their claims to be carrying out the ‘white man’s burden’ pure hypocrisy.124
Rüstow’s indictment of colonialism seemed little different to Mises’s 1927 criticisms of the hypocrisy, robbery and enslavement perpetuated by colonial powers. But the embrace of sovereignty by postcolonial states had changed the terms of the neoliberal debate. In the great period of decolonisation, the neoliberal majority was preoccupied with the danger that independent postcolonial states would refuse to submit to their existing positions in the international division of labour. They had become increasingly anxious that a ‘dangerous liaison’ between supporters of planning in developed and developing countries threatened the market system.125 Emerging agendas of industrialisation, import substitution and economic planning threatened to recapitulate the ‘totalitarian’ Fabian model, while demands for economic self-determination politicised the economy and eroded the separation of dominium and imperium.
Rüstow has been depicted as the figure against whom the neoliberal perspective on colonialism was developed.126 It is true that, in a context of armed anticolonial struggles and Soviet anti-imperialism, his fellow MPS members reacted angrily to his criticisms of European colonial powers. But Rüstow also contributed more positively to the neoliberal discourse on colonialism. Like Schumpeter, Robbins and Mises before him, he defined colonial imperialism as a phenomenon of politics, not capitalism. Challenging Rosa Luxemburg’s argument that imperialism was driven by a capitalist search for new markets, he replied that, for the economist, every market is simply an exchange. Monopoly capitalism, which Rudolf Hilferding and later Lenin had seen as the source of imperialism, was a degeneration of the market economy, he argued, produced by a political motive (‘feudal atavism’), not by economic imperatives. Like Schumpeter, Rüstow believed that, within the capitalist economy, ‘war and imperialism are nothing but bad business and undesired economic disturbances: they are not the logic but the illogic of capitalism’.127 For Rüstow, market relations were peaceful and consensual; freed of political distortions, capitalism would be a force of peace.
Although Rüstow, and his closest neoliberal colleague Röpke, are generally – and rightly – understood to have been more concerned than many of their fellow MPS members with the negative impacts of competitive markets on social integration, when it came to imperialism these ‘sociological liberals’ were great exponents of the ‘sweetness of commerce’. Echoing earlier arguments that the virtue of commerce lay in checking the violent passions, Röpke portrayed war as a matter of ‘instincts, feelings and passions’, while the ‘atmosphere created by free market economics, i.e. the principle of economic organisation inherent in “capitalism”, serve[d] rather to curb and suppress atavistic, bellicose emotions than to stir them up’.128 Röpke depicted imperialism and the rule of the passions as the results of ‘an age dominated by mass movements and mass instincts’.129 On this account, the ‘optimistic rationalism of earlier days’ had underestimated the continuing hold of instincts, passions and feelings, and the obstacles these posed to a liberal market.130
While Rüstow attributed colonial imperialism to the ‘warlike spirit’ of states, his real concern was not with the state per se, which he believed needed to be strong in order to depoliticise civil society.131 Rather, he traced the ‘cult of the great Leviathan’ not to Thomas Hobbes, but to Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the tradition of revolutionary popular sovereignty.132 As anticolonialists struggling for self-determination were drawn to Rousseau’s theorisation of the ‘will of the people’, Rüstow, in common with much neoliberal opposition to popular sovereignty, positioned the Swiss philosopher at the origin of modern totalitarianism.133 ‘Rousseau’, he wrote, ‘explicitly and emphatically rejects any constitutional limitation on the totalitarian omnipotence of the state, any reservation of human rights of the individual’.134 Rüstow’s attribution of colonialism to a tradition of popular sovereignty was central to the development of the great neoliberal dichotomy between the pacifying market and violent politics, and would later inform attempts to contest ‘totalitarian’ postcolonial sovereignty in the name of human rights.
Rüstow prefigured this later anti-totalitarian politics of human rights in another way also – by articulating a human rights discourse that broke decisively with the defences of self-determination as a human right that echoed in the speeches at Bandung. In his paper ‘Human Rights or Human Duties?’, presented at the 1960 MPS meeting, Rüstow laid out a human rights–based duty to bring freedom to the world. In contrast to the common assumption that neoliberal human rights are individualistic, he argued that freedom is social, and that human rights therefore presuppose social relations mediated by the competitive market.135 What Rüstow elsewhere described as the ‘manly fight for human rights’ generated a robust duty to defend capitalism.136 Rüstow’s position was universalist, and, by extension, interventionist: we live in ‘one world’, he argued, and therefore have a duty to realise a vision of freedom for all humanity. The endpoint of this vision was a radically federalist global arrangement in which political options were limited by human rights, ‘ethics and legal standards’.137 In Rüstow’s neoliberal ‘anti-colonialism’, we see the emerging outlines of a world whose dominant human rights ideology entails a duty to enmesh all of humanity in the capitalist division of labour.
Self-Determination and the Sad History of Private Investment
In a 1952 lecture at the San Francisco Public Library, Mises singled out the promise of the first prime minister of independent India, Jawaharlal Nehru, that private businesses would not be expropriated in the ten years following independence. ‘You can’t expect people to invest if you tell them you will expropriate them at some time in the future’, Mises retorted.138 Describing Nehru’s Fabian-inspired socialism as a step backwards even from late British rule, Mises broke starkly with what Gunnar Myrdal was then praising as India’s ‘heroic attempt’ at grand-scale planning. For Myrdal, this attempt was the only alternative to ‘continued acquiescence in economic and cultural stagnation or regression’.139 For Mises, in contrast, the refusal of peaceful commerce brought back the threat of war. If resource-rich ‘backward countries’ refuse access to foreign corporations on the market’s terms, he asked rhetorically, ‘can anyone expect that the people of the civilized countries will forever tolerate this state of affairs?’140 Mises warned ominously that the world was returning to a state in which it was not possible to access raw materials without conquest. World peace depends on unrestricted foreign investment, he argued, ‘not on the boy scouts of the United Nations’.141
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