Human Rights in Pinochet’s Chile: The Dethronement of Politics 16 страница
In the UN, things were looking increasingly gloomy from a neoliberal perspective. As more states gained their independence, the campaign against the colonial exclusion clause soon morphed into a struggle for a right to self-determination, including economic self-determination. With decision-making power in the Bretton-Woods international financial institutions weighted towards wealthy states, the UN became the site of what one historian has called ‘a strangely secluded and artificial version of the broader struggle for independence’.142 This created a new relationship between the human rights project and broader debates about development and the rights of people to sovereignty over their natural resources. In its final form, the Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights embodies this new focus. According to its Article 1.2, ‘All peoples may, for their own ends, freely dispose of their natural wealth and resources.’143 Realising the neoliberals’ worst fears, delegates from recently independent states increasingly pursued an agenda of permanent sovereignty over natural resources, which sought to secure the ‘inalienable right’ of sovereign states to dispose of the resources located in their territories, including by nationalising the foreign companies that had hitherto exploited them. ‘Today’s “human rights” as formulated by the UN’, Röpke wrote in a 1965 letter, ‘include the sacred right of a state to expropriate a power plant’.144
The shift towards economic self-determination has often been viewed as displacing the individual as the subject of human rights in favour of proclaiming what one historian calls ‘state rights’ against private capital.145 But the shift from a focus on civil and political rights to an emphasis on economic self-determination cannot easily be mapped onto a shift from protecting the individual to empowering the state. The liberal approach to human rights, which sequestered the world economy from political challenge, was supported by many of the world’s most powerful states, and licensed their interventions on behalf of their corporations. The capacity of human rights to protect individuals across borders was always one-sided: ‘No major Euro-American nation would subject itself to Third World institutional scrutiny and critique of its human rights performance.’146 In a period of US-sponsored military coups and continuing exploitation by former colonial power, postcolonial attempts to secure the societies of newly independent nations from outside intervention were not merely rationales for authoritarianism.
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For more radical anticolonialists of the period, individualistic languages of dignity and liberty were the means by which neocolonialists distracted the people of the colonies from what the Martiniquan psychiatrist and anticolonialist Frantz Fanon called their basic requirements: ‘bread, clothing, shelter’.147 Fanon’s ‘stretched Marxism’ foregrounded race as the basis for settlers’ entitlement to ‘the material benefits of colonial capitalism’.148 In proposing to do justice to ‘human dignity’, Fanon argued that neocolonialism addressed itself to the middle classes of the colonial country, who had internalised its civilisational hierarchies and sought to constitute themselves in the place of the colonial elites. While the West held up both its economic system and its ‘humanist superiority’ for emulation, Fanon urged the people of the colonies to find their own distinctive paths. Upholding a ‘new humanism’, he argued that, if the people of former colonies were to create new political and human possibilities for themselves, they had to stop honouring the ‘notorious “rights” of the occupant’ whose guarantee had been presented as the price for independence.149
Nkrumah similarly argued that, although the African continent harboured extraordinary untapped wealth, this was being used to enrich Europe, not the continent’s people. Embracing the economic policies, if not the racist paternalism, of the Fabians, Nkrumah argued that, in attempting to ‘raise the living standards of its people’, Africa could not industrialise in ‘the haphazard laissez-faire manner of Europe’, but must pursue ‘comprehensive socialist planning’.150 Going beyond the Fabians, he also argued for political unity to challenge the liberal myth of the market as a free space of mutually beneficial exchange, and alter terms of sale of raw materials. Noting that ‘decolonisation’ was a word much used by imperialist spokesmen to describe the transfer of political sovereignty, he argued that colonialism still controlled that sovereignty, and former colonies still provided the raw materials for their former rulers’ manufactures. ‘The change in the economic relationship between the new sovereign states and the erstwhile masters is only one of form’, Nkrumah maintained. ‘Colonialism has achieved a new guise.’151
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By 1958, when the MPS gathered in Princeton a year after the independence of Ghana, Mises despaired that the recent history of laissez-faire capitalism had been ‘very sad’.152 Disparaging governments and the UN for their negative view of private investment, he complained that, while such investment had succeeded economically everywhere, politically it had succeeded ‘only in a few civilized countries of Europe and America’, while elsewhere it ended in expropriation, confiscation and ‘anti-capitalistic’ policies that amounted to simple sabotage.153 Although less than 5 per cent of foreign-owned firms were nationalised at the high-point of decolonisation, some high-profile cases sent shock-waves through business circles, especially in the mineral and petroleum industries, and galvanised opposition to self-determination.154 Mises singled out the Egyptian nationalisation of the Suez Canal two years earlier, in 1956, as the turning point. The Canal held a symbolic place in the neoliberal imagination; its opening in 1869 had fostered the expansion of international trade by allowing ships to pass between Europe and Asia without circumnavigating Africa. At the Walter Lippmann Colloquium, Mises had cited the Canal as an example of those ‘works of vital importance’ that could only have been achieved by the largest of corporations.155
Mises did not mention the strict police control exercised by the British over the migrant workers who built the canal, but they played a starring role in Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s speech announcing the nationalisation.156 ‘Egypt undertook to supply labour to dig the Canal by corvée of which 120,000 died without getting paid’, he told his audience, as Egyptian troops reclaimed the canal.157 The Canal Company, the Arab nationalist leader argued, had been restored to its rightful owners, the Egyptian people, who were fighting for ‘political and economic independence’ against the domination of ‘imperialists and exploiters’.158 To Mises, this blurring between sovereignty and ownership, as much as the leverage that control of the Suez Canal gave to those who wished to disrupt world trade, was a threat to the international division of labour, and therefore to civilisation. Decolonisation was undermining the human right to trade. It was on the terrain of human rights that the neoliberals would launch their counter-attack.159
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‘There is Nothing as Timid as a Million Dollars’: Securing the Rights of Capital
In 1957 the Mont Pèlerin Society returned to the Swiss Alps to convene in the mountain village of Saint Moritz. Looking out from his window, one participant from the United States was struck by the green trees trimmed in white after a night of heavy snow. Even more pleasing to Leonard E. Read of the Foundation of Economic Education was the presence of the man who had presided over the first meeting in Mont Pèlerin, ‘the patriarch of our Society, the eighty-some-year-old and internationally famous William Rappard’.160 The 1957 meeting was the occasion of the first MPS discussion of a topic dear to the heart of the Swiss diplomat, who had devoted so much of his life to the liberal civilising mission: ‘Liberalism and Colonialism’. While Rappard was appointed to chair the session, his active life was nearing its end, and he would not participate in the development of the neoliberal response to anticolonialism. When Read greeted him effusively, Rappard told him, ‘this will be the last time you will see me. I am old.’161 That night, he had a stroke. He would die the following April. At the same time, his neoliberal colleagues would increasingly despair at the failure of the liberal teleology underpinning Rappard’s life’s work. As newly independent nations demanded sovereignty over their natural resources, the neoliberals meeting in the mountains turned their minds to saving the international division of labour from a resurgence of ‘tribal’ morals.
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The rise of anticolonialism made neoliberals increasingly defensive of European colonialism and its supposed civilising role. Their problem, as the Dutch philosopher-economist Justus Meyer put it, reprising late colonial stereotypes, was that the colonised ‘wards’ had proved far less rational and amenable to civilisation than the liberal colonialists assumed; they clung to their own customs, they lacked the IQs to embrace education, and (like those Algerians who William Rappard had viewed as a challenge to Adam Smith’s economics), they were generally ‘not inclined to work more than necessary’ to provide their accustomed standard of living. Faced with such intransigence, Meyer claimed that ‘liberalistic colonialism is at its wits’ ends’.162 In an unintegrated world, it would be all very well to leave those who refused Western pedagogy alone. But, given the commercial relations developed over centuries, granting self-determination to colonial subjects ‘would dry up the sources of tropical raw materials, oil and many things the rapidly progressing western world cannot do without’.163 Against the normative principles of liberal humanitarianism, which he believed had failed in practice, Meyer held up as an ‘elementary law of self-preservation’ that the ‘historically grown relations between colonial powers and their colonies not be broken off abruptly without something sensible to take the place of historical patterns interwoven with the economic system of the Western world’.164 The question for the neoliberals was what ‘sensible’ arrangement would confine former colonies to their allotted roles in the global division of labour as providers of raw materials and cheap labour, while shaping market subjects.
Rüstow’s fellow panellists at the 1957 ‘Liberalism and Colonialism’ session reacted violently to his critique of European colonialism. Yet they too sought to develop a language to pathologise postcolonial sovereignty and transform the postcolonial state into a barrier against the popular aspirations of its people – not a vehicle for their realisation. For the neoliberals, sovereignty had never been the telos of the civilising mission. Quite the opposite, their challenge was always to restrain popular sovereignty, to prevent ‘the masses’ from capturing the state and refusing the discipline imposed by the competitive market order. Freed from its relation to popular sovereignty and economic self-determination, the language of human rights offered them a means to legitimise transformative interventions and subject postcolonial states to universal standards aimed at protecting the international market.
In an extraordinary reversal, neoliberals in the period of decolonisation portrayed colonialism as a means of pluralistic international cooperation, humanity and inclusion, and anticolonialism as xenophobic, exclusionary, discriminatory and racist. Karl Brandt, the Stanford economist who had posed the problem of how to ensure that ‘the white people’ could return as friends, told the conference that, if independence led to ‘rule by narrow-minded racial nationalism and hostility towards international economic cooperation’, this would lower ‘levels of living’.165 The core problem, he argued, was to ensure that economic and social progress were not brought at the expense of ‘loss of individual liberty, society’s respect for human dignity, government by law, and due process and justice’. His fellow panellist Edmond Giscard d’Estaing – the father of France’s President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing and head of a company that oversaw economic transactions with the French colonies – argued that the slogan of ‘liberation from colonialism’ was licensing an ‘explosion of xenophobia’ and ‘primitive hatred’ and disrupting the work of global integration.166 If independence meant that the world would fall apart into ‘sealed off compartments’, Brandt argued, this would be a profound blow to freedom.167
The freedom that mattered most to the neoliberals was the freedom to trade across borders on non-discriminatory terms, which they represented as the necessary foundation of all freedoms and rights. ‘The institution of a free market, of competition among enterprises, freedom of entry and freedom of exit to professions and any sort of business are the safeguards and anchors of freedom and justice for the people in underdeveloped areas’, Brandt made clear.168 While he looked forward to the ‘gradual abolition of the privileged status of the white people’, this move towards equality was predicated on newly independent states accepting market discipline. Self-government was conditional on newly independent countries submitting to the demands of the market and respecting the rights of foreign traders. The neoliberals envisioned what B. S. Chimni calls a ‘borderless global space’ in which the role of Third World nation-states is to ‘facilitate the expansion of global capitalism through promoting free trade, lifting constraints on movements of capital, and ensuring infrastructure development’.169 Creating such a space could not be left to laissez-faire; it required enforceable international standards – and the right to intervene when they were flouted.
This project inspired the neoliberals in their contributions to the founding of the World Trade Organization, with its binding rules and enforcement of non-discriminatory trade.170 Yet binding trade rules were not sufficient for supporting a competitive world market. In a book on the philosophy of history published in 1957 – the year of the MPS discussion of colonialism – Mises attributed mass penury in Asia to the absence of ‘a legal and constitutional system which would have provided the opportunity for large-scale capital accumulation’.171 Mises identified the fundamental problem as that of an egalitarian moral economy, which had licensed the confiscation of private property. China lacked the morals of the market he suggested, and without a transformation of mentality and morality, aid and industrialisation would be followed only by expropriation and the consolidation of centralised state structures. Here, he and his frequent antagonist Rüstow agreed: while Rüstow worried that the social dislocation that would follow the imposition of Western civilisation on ‘natives’ who were still living in the ‘Stone Age’ would provide an opening for communism, he nonetheless argued that as ‘long as the present structure of these countries continues, we might as well convert any investment of ours into roubles’.172 For the neoliberals, a conducive climate for foreign investment required a profound social transformation, or conversion, and the adoption of the morals of the market. Exporting capital meant exporting capitalist social relations and a morality that fostered capital accumulation. Liberal philosophy ‘could triumph’, Mises argued, ‘only within an environment in which the ideal of income equality was very weak’.173 What was needed in the East was a cultural shift, and a set of institutions to foster wealth accumulation. ‘What the East Indies, China, Japan, and the Mohammedan countries lacked’, Mises wrote, ‘were institutions for safeguarding the individual’s rights.’174
This focus on the legal and institutional preconditions of development would become increasingly central to neoliberal development discourse in the subsequent decades. By 1990, the previously human rights-averse World Bank began to argue that, through its lending programme, it had always been promoting human rights. Its post-Washington-consensus focus consolidated this shift; as the bank moved from ‘market fundamentalism to governance fundamentalism’, it focused on public administration, the rule of law, accountability and transparency, and identified a lack of human rights as evidence of bad governance.175 Rather than breaking with neoliberalism, the World Bank increasingly concentrated on legal and governance structures that ‘put international property rights centre-stage and included “human” rights as an integral component of [an] international risk-governance mechanism’ that increasingly incorporated ‘ “civil society” actors’ into economic governance.176 This shift coincided with the heyday of an interventionist politics of human rights that justified the use of massive military force as a means to prevent grave human rights violations. However ‘disinterested’ many supporters of such interventions may have been, their activism helped give a humanitarian stamp to what Hobson described as the ‘strong interests’ of imperialism.
Both trends were prefigured by the neoliberals of Mont Pèlerin in the period of decolonisation. Wary that demands for self-determination would lead to the breakdown of the international division of labour, they focused their attention on producing a legal and institutional framework to constrain postcolonial states. They saw the potential that the language of human rights could be used to justify supervision of postcolonial states to ensure they protected the rights of traders. They upheld a universal humanity, with an interest in the greatest possible division of labour, and sang the praises of an open world economy (even as they were ambivalent about, and often downright antagonistic towards, mass migration). Depicting the market as a source of sweetness, gentleness and universal friendship, and politics as violent and conflictual, they sought to depoliticise social relations. Politicisation, they increasingly argued, was the key barrier to the subjective qualities – notably entrepreneurialism – that were necessary for economic advancement.
At the 1958 MPS meeting, the Mexican law professor Gustavo Velasco argued that such politicisation in his country was the consequence of underdevelopment. The harmful effects of inflation in Mexico had been primarily psychological, he argued. ‘Mexico has had and still has inflation because it has lived beyond its means.’177 Velasco attributed the underlying causes of inflation to three factors: the welfare state, the desire for economic betterment, and the desire for economic development. Inflation, he argued, resulted from access to subsidised goods and services (provided by a government that acted as a ‘third-dimensional Santa Claus’), upward pressure on wages as a result of trade union action, and over-investment by the government.178 Velasco was pessimistic about the possibility of reversing these trends. High popular expectations and the politicisation of economic life made it impossible to keep inflation under control. By 1958, Velasco had not countenanced what would be necessary to lower these expectations and depoliticise the economy. It would take another decade and a half before the neoliberals found their solution in Chile.
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