Powerless Companions or Fellow Travellers? Human Rights and the Neoliberal Assault on Post-Colonial Economic Justice

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The aim must be to reduce inequality in every area where it is found. To do this therefore we must refashion, or ‘revolutionise’, the laws which lead to the reproduction of the relations of domination and exploitation.

Mohammed Bedjaoui

Attempts to enforce the [New International Economic Order] would lead to a Hobbesian war of all against all, to a spread of totalitarian government, and to further erosion of the West.

Peter Bauer and Basil Yamey

In early 1985, the development economist Peter Bauer used a speaking opportunity at a Paris colloquium to reiterate the central tenets of the neoliberal development discourse he had done so much to shape. Bauer, aptly described by the Economist magazine as being to foreign aid what Friedrich Hayek was to socialism, told his audience that the so-called ‘Third World’ comprised 130 countries with nothing in common other than requesting and receiving help from ‘the West’.¹ In a period of neoliberal ascendancy, criticisms of aid and of demands for postcolonial redistribution of wealth were increasingly common. What made this particular speech different was the fact that Bauer was speaking at the inaugural colloquium of a new political foundation, Liberté sans Frontières (LSF), established by the French leadership of the respected humanitarian organisation Médecins sans Frontières.² What was the key neoliberal development theorist doing at such an event? And what can answering this question tell us about the relation between human rights and neoliberalism in that period – and our own?

Although LSF was billed, innocuously, as a research centre devoted to the problems of development and human rights, its first organised event, a colloquium titled ‘Le Tiers-Mondisme en question’ (‘Third Worldism in Question’), revealed its political bent. The foundation was established to challenge the affirmations of postcolonial sovereignty and economic self-determination that defined tiers-mondisme – the movement that insisted (as Alfred Sauvy stressed when, in 1952, he coined the term ‘Tiers Monde’ through analogy with Emmanuel Sieyès’s account of France’s revolutionary Third Estate) that those colonised or recently decolonised peoples who had been ignored, exploited and reduced to nothing now ‘wanted to be something’.³ LSF’s introductory materials criticised tiers-mondisme for promoting ‘simplistic’ theses that blamed underdevelopment on the looting of the Third World by the West, the deterioration of the terms of trade, the power of multinationals, and the development of cash crops at the expense of food crops.⁴

An examination of Liberté sans Frontières directs attention to the economic questions that the human rights NGOs in Latin America largely disregarded. Far from vacating the economic field and confining itself to criticising violations of civil and political rights, as Amnesty International had done in Chile, LSF mobilised the language of human rights explicitly against Third Worldist demands for postcolonial economic redistribution. Rony Brauman, a former member of the Maoist Gauche Prolétarienne, who was president of MSF and director of LSF, later reflected that he was interested in contesting the idea that ‘poverty, misery in the Global South was the by-product of our prosperity in the Global North’. This idea placed the ‘blame’ for postcolonial poverty on the ‘shoulders of the Global North’, rather than on those postcolonial leaders he believed bore responsibility for their peoples’ plights.⁵ LSF went beyond merely criticising the violation of human rights to contest what it depicted as a Western guilt complex over colonialism.

A particular target of LSF’s campaign was the demand for postcolonial economic restructuring that found its most important expression in the Non-Aligned Movement-sponsored proposal for a ‘New International Economic Order’ (NIEO). Adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1974, the NIEO declaration aimed at an international economic order ‘which shall correct inequalities and redress existing injustices’.⁶ The NIEO consolidated the postcolonial demand for a right to economic self-determination, examined in Chapter 3. Its ambitious programme for reorganising the postcolonial international economic order amounted to a neoliberal nightmare defined by effective control over natural resources, regulation of the activities of multinational corporations, just commodity prices, technology transfers, debt forgiveness and monetary reform. In 1997, Brauman reflected that when he had founded LSF he was ‘ferociously anti-Third Worldist’, because he felt that Third Worldist claims about Northern responsibility in the economic and social disaster of the South, and the need for ‘a New Economic Order’, reflected ‘at best derisory sentimentalism and at worst complicity with the bloodiest regimes’.⁷ Far from merely criticising postcolonial violence, LSF challenged the entire anticolonial economic agenda.

The vision of human rights promoted by figures associated with LSF was far from being what Samuel Moyn calls a ‘powerless companion’ of ascendant neoliberalism.⁸ Rather, LSF’s leadership drew on the rejection of structuralist economic analyses and redistribution pioneered by rising neoliberal thinkers, and used the language of human rights to shift responsibility for poverty from international economic arrangements onto Third World states. LSF offers a particularly stark example of a more general phenomenon – the uptake of neoliberal ideas by human rights NGOs in the period of their simultaneous rise. Like the dominant strand of human rights politics in Europe and the United States at the time, LSF embraced a dichotomy promoted by neoliberal thinkers between politics as violent, coercive and ultimately ‘totalitarian’, on the one hand, and the market or ‘civil society’, on the other, as a realm of free, mutually beneficial, voluntary relations. LSF went further than most, however, in directly entering the economic fray to prosecute an argument against postcolonial economic equality and in favour of a liberal economy. In doing so, it lent its moral prestige to the neoliberal counterattack on the struggle for postcolonial economic justice, and became complicit in the dramatic deepening of inequality that has been its consequence. Moreover, it helped to shape a distinctively neoliberal human rights discourse, in which civil and political rights are essential aspects of the institutional structure necessary to facilitate a liberal market order.

Liberté sans Frontières and the Question of Human Rights

The inaugural LSF colloquium, ‘Le tiers-mondisme en question’, was held in January 1985 in the voluptuous surrounds of the Palais de Luxembourg. A central theme of the colloquium was the need for a shift from political ideology to human rights.⁹ But the version of human rights LSF promoted was not ideologically neutral. LSF’s board largely comprised MSF officials and intellectuals of the ‘liberal conservative right’.¹⁰ It drew many of its personnel from the anti-communist Comité des intellectuels pour l’Europe des libertés (CIEL), (Jean-Claude Casanova and Jean-François Revel) and the Reaganite anti-communist organisation Resistance International (Jacques Broyelle, François Furet, Alain Besançon).¹¹ Brauman recalls that when he and Claude Malhuret first approached the latter about joining LSF’s board, Besançon, an anti-communist historian of the Soviet Union, outlined five conditions: the foundation must be ‘pro-European, pro-American, anti-communist, anti-Soviet and pro-Israeli’.¹² ‘We said fine, it’s perfect’, Brauman recalls. ‘This is what we think.’¹³ It was this bundle of commitments that were central to LSF’s understanding of human rights. In defending human rights, participants at the colloquium stressed that ‘the ravages of authoritarian planning were greater than those of capitalism’, Brauman reflected, and that ‘liberal, free enterprise societies were the most efficacious in preventing political and economic catastrophe’.¹⁴

The influence of Marxism on the French left, as the anti-totalitarian political philosopher Claude Lefort had noted five years earlier, had generated a ‘vehement, ironic or “scientific” condemnation of the bourgeois notion of human rights’.¹⁵ Throughout the 1970s, however, this condemnation had increasingly been replaced with a new human rights ideology, spurred in part by the publication of Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago. As has been well noted, the growing influence of Soviet dissidents helped to discredit revolutionary Marxism, clearing away a major barrier to the widespread acceptance of human rights as a progressive cause.¹⁶ In France, increasingly fervent attacks on Marxism coincided with the rise of what the French ‘New Philosopher’ André Glucksmann termed a ‘humanism of bad news’, which aimed to ameliorate the status quo while recasting the promise of emancipatory social transformation as totalitarian.¹⁷

At the time of the LSF Colloquium, Brauman situated LSF’s ‘ideology of droits de l’homme’ in the context of the demise of political messianism, and within a new morality of urgency for which ‘man’ becomes the ultimate end.¹⁸ This moralised human rights discourse, expressed in the claim to be concerned with ‘man’ and ‘human realities’ rather than messianic, utopian ideologies, was shared by many human rights activists at the time. But LSF’s human rights campaign differed from the moral ‘anti-politics’ of human rights epitomised by Amnesty International. While the latter NGO shared both LSF’s antipathy to politics and its focus on civil and political rights, it attempted to avoid Cold War polarisation by focusing on the ‘suffering simply because they are suffering’, and adopting prisoners of conscience on either side of the Iron Curtain.¹⁹ LSF fiercely rejected such even-handedness; its leadership joined the Cold War fray, prosecuting an argument for the superiority of liberalism and campaigning against both neutralism and pacifism, which its introductory materials depicted as attempts to ‘disarm the democracies and prevent them from defending themselves’.²⁰

Just as they rejected neutrality, participants at the LSF colloquium stressed that not all human rights were created equal. Brauman turned to the history of French political thought to distinguish LSF’s liberal conception of rights from a vision that presupposed a robust account of popular sovereignty. He rejected the ‘maximalist conception inherited from Rousseau’ for making democracy a means to the common good, and the state the guarantor of collective welfare.²¹ Instead, he upheld a model of rights predicated on the erasure of status divisions, which he attributed to the nineteenth-century liberal Alexis de Tocqueville. By contrasting Rousseau with Tocqueville, Brauman situated LSF’s conception of human rights on one side of a debate that pitted the affirmation of ‘the will of the people’, which had informed national liberation movements, against a deep, aristocratic-liberal suspicion of ‘the masses’, and support for France’s colonial mission.²² In doing so, he positioned his own human rights politics in a lineage that, as we have seen, the neoliberals also claimed. Hayek’s original name for the Mont Pèlerin Society was the ‘Acton-Tocqueville Society’, and, as we have seen, the neoliberals praised Tocqueville’s criticisms of mass democracy as a necessary antidote to the totalitarianism of Rousseauian popular sovereignty.²³ This contrast between Rousseau and Tocqueville enabled Brauman to uphold a narrow, non-revolutionary conception of human rights, defined by civil and political rights and equality before the law, both against a conception of rights as expressions of popular sovereignty, and against state guarantees of social welfare.

Participants at the LSF colloquium depicted civil and political rights as ‘categorical imperatives’, while making clear that social and economic rights were ‘less fundamental, universal, and timelessly important’.²⁴ This distinction was borrowed from Raymond Aron, whose influence on the men who established LSF was such that the foundation came close to being named the Fondation Raymond Aron pour le Tiers Monde.²⁵ Malhuret also placed the foundation in a liberal tradition stretching from Tocqueville to Aron. ‘We were Aronian’, he reflected decades later, ‘which means Tocquevillian and Aronian.’²⁶ The figure Allan Bloom called ‘the last of the liberals’ was a distinctly French liberal, but Aron was also an Atlanticist who played an important role in transatlantic and European liberal networks. He was present at the 1938 Walter Lippmann Colloquium, and at the founding meeting of the Mont Pèlerin Society just under a decade later.²⁷

Aron and Hayek were friends, and, despite their differences over the possibility of a ‘third way’ between the free market and economic planning, which ultimately led to Aron’s resignation from the MPS in 1955, the two had strikingly similar views about human rights.²⁸ Both men criticised the drafters of the UDHR for having ‘confused incompatible ideas’, in Aron’s words, by failing to distinguish rights, which constrained the state in the interests of individual freedom, from social and economic objectives that relied on the extension of state power.²⁹ In terms that were later taken up by participants at the LSF colloquium, Aron distinguished civil and political rights, which he depicted as what Immanuel Kant had termed ‘categorical imperatives’, or fundamental moral principles, from social objectives that may be ‘theoretically desirable’ but do not amount to rights.³⁰ Just as Hayek had criticised the UDHR by arguing that to speak of rights in a socioeconomic context ‘debases the word “right”’, Aron argued that, when compared to the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, the UDHR reflected ‘the decline of all rights, of the very notion of the rights of man’.³¹ The eighteenth-century authors ‘did not entrust the state the goal of promoting what we today call “social and economic rights”’, he wrote, but were concerned to limit state power. In contrast, the twentieth-century drafters downgraded the right to private property and expanded the powers of the state to provide for the welfare of its population. In this transition, he argued, ‘the state is the victor’, since rights no longer restrict or condemn it.³²

Looking back, Brauman reflected that this distinction between ‘the categorical imperative, like not to torture people and free speech’ and ‘wishable social objectives’, such as social security, was ‘at the core of Liberté sans Frontières’.³³ LSF, like both Aron and Hayek, focused on violations of civil and political rights, and warned that the state mobilisation necessary for social and economic welfare in former colonies would threaten economic and political freedom. Aron did not share Hayek’s contention that wealthy democracies would set forth along the ‘road to serfdom’ if they attempted to provide for material welfare, but he worried that ‘under-developed countries’ could not ‘make the passage from the formal to the material without recourse to violence’.³⁴

The French humanitarians positioned themselves in opposition to both Marxist critiques of the formalism of rights and anticolonial affirmations of self-determination as the foundational human right.³⁵ This shift in priorities was reflected in the composition of the colloquium: while Third Worldism had stressed the political agency of national liberation movements, no nationals of the countries under discussion spoke at the LSF colloquium.³⁶ In this respect, LSF emblematised what Kristin Ross suggests is a key legacy of French opposition to Third Worldism: the transformation of the ‘colonial or third-world other’ from militant and articulate fighter and thinker to passive object of sympathy.³⁷ Making this shift required a concerted attack on Third Worldist critiques of postcolonial economic exploitation.

Contesting ‘Western Guilt’

The invitation to the ‘Third Worldism in Question’ colloquium was sent by MSF’s head, Malhuret, who would soon complete a spectacular transition from medical doctor to secretary of state for human rights in Jacques Chirac’s right-wing government. Third Worldism, Malhuret wrote, promotes a few simple ideas: ‘the West has looted the resources of the third world, terms of trade have deteriorated, the actions of multinational corporations are harmful’.³⁸ The invitation framed the colloquium as a challenge to publicly accepted notions like ‘the rich world’s cows eat the soybeans of the poor’, or ‘ “a new international economic order” is the only solution to under-development’.³⁹ LSF was established, as an article in the Guardian noted, to counter Third Worldism, ‘which it accuses of feeding on a European guilt complex that blames all the problems of the Third World on Western economic dominance’.⁴⁰ Such an analysis, LSF figures argued, serves to excuse those who should bear responsibility for the problems of former colonies: postcolonial states.

In contesting Western responsibility for Third World poverty, the men of LSF set themselves against an analysis of colonial exploitation that had played a central role in anticolonialism, dependency theory and French tiers-mondisme in the previous decades. Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth epitomised this argument, powerfully insisting that Europe was, quite literally, a product of the Third World. ‘The wealth which smothers her was stolen from the underdeveloped peoples.’⁴¹ This indictment was reiterated by Jean-Paul Sartre in his infamous 1961 preface to Fanon’s book. Addressing himself to his French compatriots, Sartre wrote: ‘You know well enough that we are exploiters. You know too that we have laid hands on first the gold and metals, then the petroleum of the “new continents”, and that we have brought them back to the old countries.’⁴² By the time LSF was founded, Sartre’s influence had waned, along with the Third Worldism he championed.

By the time of the LSF colloquium, earlier critiques of the complicity of wealthy nations in postcolonial poverty were being usurped by new concerns with human rights abuses in the post-colony.⁴³ LSF argued that the Asian ‘miracle’ economies of South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan had been condemned for failing to conform to Third Worldist tenets, while disastrous programmes – in Mao’s China, Ho Chi Minh’s Vietnam, Julius Nyerere’s Tanzania, Kwame Nkrumah’s Ghana, Fidel Castro’s Cuba, and the Nicaraguan Sandinistas – had been presented as models.⁴⁴ In stark contrast to the arguments of Fanon and Sartre, this new anti-totalitarian human rights organisation focused on left-wing ‘totalitarian’ regimes, largely ignoring the lamentable human rights records of both the right-wing authoritarian regimes then terrorising much of Latin America and those dictatorial Asian regimes it celebrated.

LSF played a central role in delegitimising Third Worldist accounts of economic exploitation. Its mission, Brauman explained at the time, was ‘to challenge a perception of the problem in which their poverty is a reflection of our wealth, and our liberties are based on the absence of theirs’.⁴⁵ In his introduction to the published proceedings of the inaugural LSF colloquium, Brauman situated LSF within a new morality of urgency and an ideology of les droits de l’homme, which makes ‘man’ the highest value. Nonetheless, his speech overwhelmingly addressed economic matters, and challenged a series of Third Worldist theses: that Europe had trampled its own values in colonial plunder; that this plunder was the source of Europe’s opulence; that the world economic system was a neocolonial system that made the rich richer and the poor poorer; that the Third World was the victim of a blind and cynical West; and that its bread basket was held hostage to the economic powers of Western countries. Such structuralist theses, Brauman argued, were a ‘game of mirrors’ in which Europe only ever saw itself.⁴⁶

MSF’s leading figures, a news article of the time noted, ‘are disgusted by the fashionable current wisdom holding the west responsible for the Third World’s destitution and that seeks to make us feel guilty about our standard of living’.⁴⁷ This theme of guilt and responsibility was taken up most ferociously by Pascal Bruckner, the French essayist and ‘New Philosopher’ who today is best known for his vehement attacks on multiculturalism and Islam.⁴⁸ Bruckner delivered a key speech, ‘Third World, Guilt, Self-Hate’, at the inaugural LSF colloquium.⁴⁹ In Le Sanglot de l’homme blanc (‘Tears of the White Man’), published just before the colloquium, Bruckner had launched an excoriating attack on what he depicted as the Third Worldist guilt complex about colonialism. ‘How long will the peoples of Europe continue to be blamed for the atrocities committed by their ancestors?’ he asked – just two decades after France’s withdrawal from Algeria.⁵⁰ For Bruckner and the founders of LSF, Third Worldism was a product of masochism and guilt, which generated a willingness to tolerate Third World repression. Despite these accusations, the LSF figures implicitly recognised that Third Worldism was what Kristin Ross has termed ‘an aggressive new way of accusing the capitalist system’ and the neo-imperialist relations that had succeeded formal colonialism.⁵¹ LSF constituted a similarly aggressive counterattack. Its disparate group of liberals, humanitarians, Atlanticists and Reaganites found unity in the rejection of ‘Western guilt’ over colonialism and opposition to Third Worldist demands for restructuring the international economic order. In doing so, they drew on themes developed by the neoliberals over the previous decades.

The Neoliberal Precedent: The Mont Pèlerin Society and Colonial Guilt

The arguments rehearsed by the humanitarians in the 1980s have more recently become staples of a newer, revisionist ‘case for colonialism’, but they also have a much older ancestry.⁵² Much of their logic can be traced to an earlier stage of neoliberal thinking; the need to challenge what Röpke termed ‘the ill-timed Christian emphasis on Western guilt’ over colonialism had shaped MPS discussions of development since the early 1950s.⁵³ The theme of colonial guilt emerged in the context of the controversy over Rüstow’s criticisms of the colonial powers for trampling on the ‘human dignity of the colonial peoples’, which I examined in Chapter 3.⁵⁴ Rüstow’s argument at the 1957 MPS meeting in Saint Moritz that ‘we’ still lack guilt and a sense of penitence towards the victims of colonialism reflected his Christian faith. While he also argued that, without European intervention, former colonies would be more ‘backward’ than they are today, his fellow panellists, Edmond Giscard d’Estaing, Peter Bauer, Karl Brandt and Arthur Shenfield, reacted vehemently to this concern for colonial crimes and to his suggestion that Europeans had something to be guilty about.⁵⁵

Against the backdrop of the Algerian war, Giscard d’Estaing rejected the ‘simplification grossière’ of depicting colonialism as the domination of one people by another. Colonialism, he suggested, enabled nomadic desert peoples (for instance) to benefit from oil they would otherwise waste. Shenfield and Brandt praised the developmental accomplishments of colonialism, and the latter rejected Rüstow’s attribution of guilt: ‘one can leave the hypocritical assault on colonialism to those who practice it now with the plain intent to enslave peoples’, he contended, referring to the anti-colonialism of the Soviet Union.⁵⁶

At this stage, the MPS discourse on colonialism was classically liberal, and it drew heavily on John Locke’s justification of colonialism as ‘improvement’. God meant for the earth to be cultivated, Locke had contended, and thus he gave it to the ‘industrious and rational’.⁵⁷ Those who ‘fail’ to improve the land – d’Estaing’s nomadic desert people who wasted the oil beneath their feet, for instance – had no grounds for complaint if it was appropriated by others. The rise of anticolonialism made the neoliberals starkly aware of the difficulties of maintaining colonial rule, and, more importantly, of securing the continued exploitation of the colonies in its wake. ‘I need hardly tell liberals that it is not easy for them to advocate the rule of others for their own good’, Shenfield told the panel.⁵⁸ Although Shenfield attributed this point to John Stuart Mill, we have seen that Mill believed despotism was legitimate in governing ‘barbarians’ – ‘provided the end be their improvement’.⁵⁹ Writing in the context of rising anticolonial struggles, Shenfield feared that the repression necessary to maintain colonialism would be ‘bitter enough to poison the West itself and sap its own liberalism’.⁶⁰ Justice may be with the French in Algeria, he warned, but the attempt to maintain French rule may ruin France herself.

The reaction to Rüstow’s book elevated the rejection of Western guilt into a formative tenet of neoliberal development discourse. Yet, rather than a backward-looking attempt to secure the colonial order, this rejection was forward-looking, orientated towards forestalling Third Worldist demands for restitution. This is clearest in the work of Bauer, who had stressed since the early 1970s that ‘it is untrue that the west has caused the poverty of the underdeveloped world, whether through colonialism or otherwise’.⁶¹ Bauer, a Hungarian-born British development economist and MPS member, was a vehement opponent of state-directed development and Cold War modernisation theories. In 1981, several years before the LSF Colloquium, Bauer published a book that attributed accounts of Western responsibility for Third World poverty to colonial guilt.⁶² In his presentation to the LSF Colloquium he reiterated this argument and forcefully criticised the idea that foreign aid was compensation for Western errors; no restitution was necessary, he contended, as former colonies had benefited from colonialism.⁶³

Bauer’s response to postcolonial demands of the 1970s was largely consistent with the earlier MPS members’ Lockean defence of European colonialism. Referring to an English student pamphlet that accused the British of taking ‘the rubber from Malaya, the tea from India, raw materials from all over the world’, Bauer – who had begun his career working for a trading company with rubber interests in Malaya – retorted that this was the opposite of the truth; ‘the British took the rubber to Malaya and the tea to India’, he wrote.⁶⁴ Far from the West causing the poverty of the Third World, Bauer argued that (what he euphemistically called) ‘contacts with the West’ had been the central agents of material progress.⁶⁵ At the LSF colloquium, Bauer argued that the world’s poorest peoples were indigenous communities and ‘Amazonian Indians’, precisely because they enjoyed the fewest ‘external contacts’. Taiwan, Hong Kong, Malaysia and Singapore, in contrast, offered proof of the economic benefits such ‘contacts’ brought.⁶⁶ Elsewhere, Bauer claimed that not even the transatlantic slave trade could be claimed as a cause of ‘African backwardness’, as slavery had been endemic in Africa prior to the slave trade and was only ended by the West. ‘Whatever one thinks of colonialism it can’t be held responsible for Third World poverty’, he concluded.⁶⁷

Bauer reserved his most strenuous criticism for those who spoke of ‘economic colonialism’ or ‘neo-colonialism’, to define the situation of post-independence states. Such terminology, he argued, ‘confuses poverty with colonial status, a concept which has normally meant lack of political sovereignty’.⁶⁸ Bauer took direct aim at the analysis of neocolonialism developed by Kwame Nkrumah that we examined in Chapter Three. Bauer challenged this politicisation of economic relations, and rejected Nkrumah’s charge that neo-colonialism was keeping the African continent ‘artificially poor’.⁶⁹ A nation can be subjected to political colonialism, he argued, but it makes no sense to speak of colonisation or domination in the economy as economic relations are not the product of the imposition of a single will. On the contrary, he argued that the market impersonally coordinated the free, voluntary interactions of numerous individuals, and must be protected (by the state and law) from political interference.

Drawing on the theorisation of the market as information processor that enabled people to draw on dispersed, tacit knowledge, developed by his MPS colleague Hayek, Bauer depicted the market as a system of disseminated knowledge and mutually beneficial free exchange that produces order without the need for conscious and deliberate planning. Prices for raw materials were set by the market and not determined by the West, he argued – they were the products of numerous individual decisions, and not of the actions of a single decision-maker or of collective collusion.⁷⁰ For the neoliberals, any intervention that altered the results achieved by the subtle mechanism of the price system would prevent its feedback loops from operating. This neoliberal position provided the humanitarians with a weapon in their struggle against Third Worldism. Price fluctuations were ‘not dependent on international speculators but on the market’, Malhuret contended. And the ‘tendency of international trade is that all parties to an exchange benefit’.⁷¹ But the neoliberals’ argument was not simply economic; rather, they followed Montesquieu in arguing that, as commercial relations were founded on mutual need, the ‘natural effect of commerce is to lead to peace’.⁷² Neoliberal thinkers depicted the market as a realm of peaceful and mutually beneficial relations, and portrayed politics as a Schmittian field of friend/enemy distinctions and violent coercion.⁷³ ‘Peter was resolutely against the politicization of life’, Bauer’s friend Anthony Daniels reflected at a 2004 dinner held in his honour at Princeton University. ‘Such politicization, in his view, not only was inimical to development, but destructive of civilization – another value for which Peter cared deeply’.⁷⁴

‘Difference’ Against Equality

Bauer concluded his speech at the LSF Colloquium by rejecting the premise of discussions about Third World poverty: ‘There is no problem in the Third World’, he argued; ‘there are only differences of income’ – differences which are ‘neither surprising nor reprehensible’.⁷⁵ Along with his neoliberal colleagues, Bauer replaced the language of ‘inequality’ (which implied unjust structural relations) with that of ‘difference’ (which was merely the necessary condition of a competitive economy). There was nothing emancipatory about this stress on difference. For the neoliberals, ‘difference’ was the apolitical condition of a competitive economy, which, as Foucault notes, is defined not by the exchange of equivalents but by a ‘game of differentiations’ in which some have large incomes and others do not.⁷⁶ The neoliberal rhetoric of ‘difference’ naturalised and justified deep and racialised inequalities, and obscured the history of colonial exploitation. Differences between countries, Bauer argued, do not stem from the ‘pillaging of one by another’.⁷⁷ Repeatedly, he took aim at the contention articulated most succinctly by Tanzania’s President Julius Nyerere: ‘In one world, as in one state, when I am rich because you are poor, and I am poor because you are rich, the transfer of wealth from rich to poor is a matter of right; it is not an appropriate matter for charity.’⁷⁸

All Bauer’s writings aimed to demolish the premise that the wealth of the colonial powers was a consequence of the poverty of the colonised – and vice versa. The prosperity of the United States and Japan, he insisted, has nothing to do with the poverty of Chad, Mali and Nepal.⁷⁹ The development economist therefore rejected the very category of the ‘Third World’, arguing that it conflated ‘a vast and diverse collection of societies differing widely in religion, culture, social institutions, personal characteristics and motivations’. It was a travesty to ‘lump together Chinese merchants of Southeast Asia, Indian villagers, tribal societies of Africa, oil-rich Arabs of the Middle East, aborigines and desert peoples, inhabitants of huge cities in India, Africa and Latin America’, Bauer wrote, and envisage them all as ‘a low-level uniform mass’.⁸⁰ Along the same lines, the founders of LSF rejected the ‘notion of a (non-existent) unified third world’, and the political indictment of the global capitalist economy that it implied.

Responding to the prevalence of such arguments in our own time, Vijay Prashad has argued that complaints about the homogenisation of distinct histories and regions embodied in the term ‘Third World’ miss the point that the term itself was an ‘act of artifice for a global social movement’.⁸¹ The unity of the ‘Third World’, such as it was, was premised neither on a shared culture nor on a racialised nationalism but on the difficult attempt to build a form of political solidarity capable of challenging the unequal arrangement of the international economy.⁸² The insistence on heterogeneity may be motivated by a critical urge. But, as Arif Dirlik suggests, ‘unaccompanied by a sense of structural context, it culminates in a radical empiricism that undercuts its own call for critical understanding’.⁸³ In affirming difference against the abstractions of Third Worldism, the neoliberals, and their humanitarian allies, drew on a tradition of anti-rationalist anti-egalitarianism that stems back at least to Edmund Burke’s conservative critique of the French Revolution. They joined a lineage of liberal and cosmopolitan opponents of revolution who have long ‘depicted the levelling abstractions of egalitarian fanaticisms as violent denials of the empirical complexities that only the joint work of representative institutions and market transactions is capable of coordinating’.⁸⁴

Consistent with this lineage, Bauer criticised proposals for redistribution, which he argued rest on the belief that, as we are all ‘basically the same’, wealth differentials must reflect ‘some perversion of the natural and just course of events by some malevolent force, in particular, the power of the rich to impoverish the rest’.⁸⁵ The rejection of what Jacques Rancière and Alain Badiou term the ‘axiom of equality’ played a key role in neoliberal thought.⁸⁶ Bauer, like Mises much earlier, stressed the basic inequality of people, and of peoples, arguing that economic achievement depends primarily on ‘aptitudes, motivations, mores and modes of thought and on social institutions and political arrangements’. Those who benefit from a market economy are those who are most adaptable, entrepreneurial, industrious, ingenious, thrifty, ambitious and resourceful, he claimed, while the ‘less adaptable may go to the wall’.⁸⁷

The Morals of Development

Bauer depicted generalised poverty as a result of the absence of an institutional structure capable of promoting the subjective qualities the competitive market required. His remedies were not as brutal as those used by the Chicago Boys in Chile, but the aim was the same: to eradicate non-market sources of social reproduction in order to enforce submission to the market and cultivate entrepreneurial subjects. Far from advancing laissez-faire, Bauer advocated a legal and institutional structure that would foster individualism by replacing communal land tenure with individual property rights, freeing individuals from the ‘hand of custom’ and the extended family system (‘with its drain on resources and its stifling of personal initiative’).⁸⁸

While neoliberals in the US, the UK and Europe bolstered their challenge to the welfare state by bemoaning its weakening of family responsibility, as we saw in Chapter 2, the neoliberal development theorists faced precisely the opposite problem: in the Global South, they believed that the extended family structure was too effective in its welfare function; in cushioning individuals from the imperatives of wage labour, the extended family was a barrier to a competitive market order, and its redistributive moral economy diminished the rewards of individual entrepreneurialism. Outside any West African bank, the South African economist and Oxford chair in colonial economics, S. Herbert Frankel, told the 1958 MPS meeting, one sees people waiting for their relatives to draw money ‘ready to pounce on them like vultures, because they believe they have the “right” to be supported or assisted by a relative who has some wealth’.⁸⁹ The problems of development were not strictly economic. The challenge for the neoliberals was to overcome the egalitarianism of communal cultures and the assumption that basic welfare was a right, and to instil the morals of the market and a culture of individual rights.

For Bauer, what was required was not state passivity or laissez-faire, but the conscious and appropriate reshaping of institutional structures and subjectivities. Institutions, he believed, should ensure political stability, the enforcement of law and order, and a rule of law to prevent discrimination against more productive groups (minorities or foreigners whose economic successes were resented by majorities). While the state should not compensate the losers of this market game, it should ‘make them aware of their opportunities and rights’.⁹⁰ In Bauer’s works, stretching back to the 1950s, we find the central tenets of a neoliberal human rights discourse, for which human rights were legal and moral technologies inseparable from, and necessary for the promotion of, a liberal, competitive market order. This human rights discourse would increasingly be adopted by human rights NGOs from the 1970s, most explicitly by LSF.

Reflecting on his motivations in founding LSF from a distance of more than three decades, Malhuret acknowledged: ‘Bauer was for me extremely important’. It was in Bauer’s books that it was possible to read that everything thinkers on the left were saying about economic development and redistribution was wrong, ‘and the only way to develop a country is the way that the Western countries, and Australia and America, have taken during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries’.⁹¹ Following Bauer in obscuring the role of colonial development in the ‘normal development’ of the colonial powers, Malhuret argued that the French in 1777 or 1778 were in exactly the same economic situation as people in the Third World now, with the same life expectancy, the same famines, the same agricultural problems. ‘And what did they do?’ he asked. ‘They did not write a charter about economic and social rights, they wrote a charter that would allow them, from that point on, to build a political system which would, little by little, take them out of poverty’.⁹² In disparaging demands for redistribution, the humanitarians of LSF committed themselves to an (anti)-political vision that combined human rights with ‘renewed faith in the efficicacy of the market economy’.⁹³ Liberté sans Frontières proposed that ‘respect for natural rights may be the condition sine qua non of real economic and social development’.⁹⁴ In doing so, they joined the battle alongside the neoliberal ideologues against the clearest competing vision of international order and economic relations: the New International Economic Order.

Competing Utopias: Human Rights and the New International Economic Order

At the 1973 Algiers meeting of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), Algeria’s President Houari Boumediène stressed the ‘vital need for the producing countries to operate the levers of price control’.⁹⁵ The success of the 1973 oil embargo by the Organisation of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) had bolstered confidence that similar collective action on the part of producers of raw materials could alter the terms of trade and transform an international economic system that was perpetuating exploitation, racial discrimination and the impoverishment of the Third World. The Algiers meeting saw NAM turn towards economic questions, rejecting the understanding of the market as a free space of mutually beneficial exchanges and challenging the economic order inherited from colonialism. The following year, 1974, the UN General Assembly passed the ‘Declaration on the Establishment of a New International Economic Order’, which proclaimed the ‘right of all States, territories and peoples under foreign occupation, alien and colonial domination or apartheid to restitution and full compensation for the exploitation and depletion’ of their natural resources by colonial powers.⁹⁶

If the NIEO declaration used the language of rights, its vision differed starkly from the human rights agenda pursued by major human rights NGOs such as Amnesty International or Human Rights Watch, which depicted Third World suffering as an internal problem caused by the failure of postcolonial states to comply with human rights norms. It was this latter vision of individual human rights that Moyn dubbed the ‘last utopia’.⁹⁷ But throughout the 1970s, as Antony Anghie notes, much of the world was still struggling for the ‘utopia of development’, and saw the NIEO as the best chance of achieving it.⁹⁸ While Bauer and his fellow neoliberals depicted the market as a realm of free and mutually beneficial exchange, advocates of the NIEO argued that an economic framework developed to govern trade between equals could not resolve the colonial inheritance of unequal economic relations. They directly contested the view that the market should be governed only by a framework that did not interfere with the setting of prices, like that enshrined in the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trades – which, like the UDHR, came into force in 1948, while much of the world’s population still lived under colonial rule.

Following earlier physiocrat and classical liberal opposition to industrial combinations, opponents of the NIEO depicted the attempt by producers of raw materials to influence prices as a coercive intervention into the free and voluntary relations of market exchange and a threat to the rights of buyers. In accruing to themselves the powerful language of freedom, they gave a progressive gloss to their campaign against Third Worldism that appealed to those who had become increasingly uneasy about violence in the Third World, especially in the wake of the Nigerian civil war (1967–70), the exodus of asylum seekers from Vietnam in the wake of the US war, and the genocide in Cambodia.⁹⁹

Such evocations of market freedom obscured the coercion and political intervention that upheld existing ‘free’ market relations. No market is unregulated, and there is no realm (as the neoliberals themselves insisted) of natural equilibrium. All economic relations are subjected to rules and regulations, which distribute wealth in various ways. The relevant question is therefore not whether a market is ‘free’ or regulated, but who benefits from the distributional outcomes entailed by various modes of regulation – and how just those benefits are.¹⁰⁰ Rather than aiming to replace free-market relations with coercive price control, as their opponents claimed, defenders of the NIEO challenged the order of ‘freedom’ and ‘equality’ that benefited colonial powers and their corporations at the expense of former colonies, and they called for ‘ “substantive equality” to compensate for inequality’.¹⁰¹ Here, they followed Marx, who argued in his Critique of the Gotha Program that ‘equal right’, which measures unequal individuals by a single standard, ignores their different abilities and needs, and can only result in inequality. ‘To avoid all these defects’, Marx wrote, ‘right, instead of being equal, would have to be unequal.’¹⁰²

The neoliberals, in contrast, celebrated equal right precisely for its role in perpetuating existing inequalities. Hayek and his neoliberal colleagues were fervent defenders of the rule of law because they believed that, given that people are unequal, the ‘only way to place them in an equal position would be to treat them differently’.¹⁰³ They saw a stress on formal equality before the law as a means to prevent redistribution for the purpose of greater substantive or socioeconomic equality, and to rule out demands for foreign aid, support for industries of former colonies, or reparations to transform the legacies of past injustice.¹⁰⁴

Bedjaoui was the strongest critic of this order of equal right. The Algerian lawyer disparaged the ‘froth and veneer of decolonisation’, and highlighted the persistence of ‘universal exploitation, and the dichotomy between poverty and affluence’ in the wake of formal independence.¹⁰⁵ The very neutrality and formalism of international law had permitted colonisation, exploitation and racial discrimination, Bedjaoui argued, and facilitated the enrichment of the wealthy countries at the expense of impoverished ones.¹⁰⁶ Just as Marxist critics of human rights have argued that abstract equality and freedom mask substantive inequality and domination, Bedjaoui rejected the ‘phantom sovereignty’ that masked relations of domination under the cover of formal equality.¹⁰⁷ Instead, he invoked a new international law that would facilitate ‘corrective or compensatory inequality’ to promote the development of the Third World.¹⁰⁸

What role did human rights play in this new international law? Although critics have noted Bedjaoui’s universalism, they tend to depict him, and the NIEO agenda, as ‘generally unsympathetic’ to the rhetoric of human rights.¹⁰⁹ Bedjaoui’s strident defence of the sovereignty of newly independent states did put him firmly at odds with the new human rights movement of the time, and the NIEO has been depicted as a programme of ‘state rights against private capital’, for which the freedom and rights of individual citizens was an ‘ancillary product’ of national independence.¹¹⁰ In reality, however, Bedjaoui was not indifferent to individual rights, and nor did he subordinate the individual to the state. The Algerian lawyer celebrated the fact that the ‘State, that Moloch or Kronos that devours its own people, or rather, devours itself, is in process of being de-hallowed’, and stressed that the equitable sharing of the world’s resources required attending to the problem of ‘human rights’. ‘What would be the use of exploiting for man’s benefit the immense riches of the sea-bed, within the framework of the new ‘law of mankind’, he asked, ‘if man’s dignity or integrity is threatened’?¹¹¹ While Bedjaoui mobilised the language of human dignity and rights, his horizon, and his universalism, extended far beyond the liberal individualism of the major human rights NGOs of his time. Like his anticolonial predecessors who had successfully fought for the recognition of national self-determination as a human right, Bedjaoui sought to challenge the postcolonial persistence of economic exploitation and political domination.¹¹²

Bedjaoui drew on the history of the rights of man to contest those who criticised the NIEO as futile utopianism. ‘When in 1788 and 1789 the French people presented their ‘books of grievances’ (cahiers de dolé-ances), he wrote, ‘there were, as there are today, knowledgeable souls who considered them to be pure rhetoric, far removed from reality’. Like Alfred Sauvy before him, Bedjaoui compared the Third World to the Third Estate; for the former, too, he predicted optimistically: ‘Today’s rhetoric will be tomorrow’s reality’.¹¹³ Whatever its rhetorical force, this analogy broke down as the Third World project came under sustained assault from the world’s most powerful economic interests. The Third Estate, Sieyès famously argued, resembled a ‘strong, robust man with one arm in chains’.¹¹⁴ It sought only to break this bondage, and end the privileges that gave the nobility exclusive rights.¹¹⁵ However revolutionary it was in its (rather limited) time and place, Sieyès’s defence of ‘free competition’ and legal equality did not serve well those people whose experience of colonial bondage had sapped their strength and economic resources, leaving them less robust than Sieyès’s rising bourgeoisie.¹¹⁶ Instead, the languages of free competition and equality before the law became central to a neoliberal counterattack, to which the NIEO would ultimately succumb.

Contesting the New International Economic Order

In 1981, with neoliberalism in the ascendancy, US President Ronald Reagan used his speech at the Cancún summit on development to exhort Third World leaders to embrace ‘the magic of the market’. Cancún has been described as the ‘death-knell of the NIEO’, the moment when it was finally displaced by the neoliberal counter-revolution in development theory.¹¹⁷ The early success of the Third Worldist economic agenda provided a strong impetus for the consolidation of what Mark Mazower has termed ‘the real new economic order’.¹¹⁸ By the early 1980s, Third World states were struggling under the weight of spiralling foreign debt, and the NIEO agenda had been largely displaced by the US-led global project of trade liberalisation, deregulation and privatisation, which made the former’s proposals for economic decolonisation look utopian indeed. At the same time, the human rights–based ‘critique of the atrocity, misrule and despotism of the state’ was wielded by both human rights advocates and neoliberals against the utopia envisaged by Third Worldists.¹¹⁹

From its inception, Liberté sans Frontières sought to contest the argument that a ‘new international economic order’ was the solution to underdevelopment.¹²⁰ In his introduction to the proceedings of the LSF Colloquium, Brauman argued that the absurd and dangerous NIEO would result in inflation and a transfer of wealth from the poorest to the most favoured individuals and nations.¹²¹ He contended that the NIEO was built on the false premise that the terms of trade between rich and poor countries were deteriorating and that, if implemented, it would lead away from the successful path pursued by Asian countries like South Korea.¹²² Looking back more recently, Malhuret reflected that LSF’s founders believed ‘the path taken by the New [International] Economic Order was leading to a dead end’, while countries with liberal economies – the so called ‘Asian Tigers’ – were developing rapidly.¹²³ The real stake in this attack on the NIEO was defending the efficacy of a liberal economic order against demands for redistribution and state planning. The ‘burden of human error and bad local political decisions, rather than external elements, is the determining factor in a number of tragic situations’, Brauman stressed.¹²⁴

Despite the stated aims of LSF to provide a forum ‘free of ideological presuppositions’, its attacks on Third Worldism and the NIEO intersected with the agenda of Reaganite neoliberals, who had become increasingly concerned that the new nations were vilifying ‘the West’ and the free enterprise system’.¹²⁵ Philippe Laurent, then Executive Director of MSF Belgium, recalls a meeting in which Malhuret explained his proposed organisation as a ‘war machine’ that would combat Third Worldism and ‘fight for neoliberal ideas’. Malhuret’s model, Laurent recalls, was the Reaganite US think tank the Heritage Foundation. Both Malhuret and Brauman visited the Heritage Foundation, and while they both later reflected that it was too far to their right, there was nonetheless a disconcerting similarity in the two groups’ responses to the NIEO.¹²⁶ The same year that LSF held its first colloquium, the Heritage Foundation declared that, in the name of a New International Economic Order, the General Assembly had attacked ‘the very essence and philosophy of the free enterprise system. The undeveloped world, it charged, seemingly without irony, ‘prefers to strive to get a share of the West’s wealth as a kind of wealth transfer payment rather than work at creating its own wealth’.¹²⁷

By the early 1980s, such views were becoming mainstream. By that time, the United States had overcome what the US diplomat Daniel Patrick Moynihan called the ‘massive failure of American diplomacy’ in the face of Third World claims, and was forcefully challenging the Third World agenda.¹²⁸ In a 1975 article that resulted in his appointment as US ambassador to the UN, Moynihan had warned that the Third World was advancing a vision of the future that came ‘ominously close to looting’. Moynihan argued that the spontaneous ideology of Third Worldism was an inheritance of Fabianism. He laid out an oppositional strategy with three key ‘points of systematic attack’: defending liberal institutions, including ‘the most creative international institution of the twentieth century’, the multinational corporation; challenging the idea of a crisis in the Third World, pointing out that ‘these economies do less well than they ought: that the difference is of their own making and no one else’s, and no claim on anyone else arises in consequence’; and, following the lead of organisations like Amnesty International, ‘speaking for political and civil liberty’ with ‘enthusiasm and zeal’.¹²⁹

These lines of attack are echoed in the LSF founding document almost a decade later. That document stridently advances the superiority of liberal democracy, and defends multinational corporations from ‘simplistic’ attacks on their power. It rejects an economic ‘diagnosis marked by catastrophism’ (which it attributes to critical development scholars René Dumont, Susan George and Frances Moore Lappé), and shifts responsibility for postcolonial poverty onto the ‘suicidal’ policies of Third World states. Finally, it proposes a global campaign to highlight the abuses of political liberties and human rights in the Third World.¹³⁰ The human rights vision outlined by LSF was not simply an alternative to the structural analysis embodied in the NIEO – rather, it was part of a concerted attempt to shift attention from the global economy to the Third World state. Despite these similarities, however, much had changed in the decade that separated Moynihan’s article, written at the peak of the OPEC oil blockade, from the LSF colloquium.

The success of the NIEO, as Berger has noted, would have required the capacity to redistribute resources on a global scale.¹³¹ By the time the NIEO was calling for the extension of redistributive welfare policies to the global arena, these policies were in crisis.¹³² Anghie has argued that, given that the human rights movement of the 1970s shifted attention away from the structure of the global economy, it is ‘surely not a coincidence’ that this movement flourished alongside the imposition of neoliberal policies by the international financial institutions. I have suggested that there is more at stake in this ‘non-coincidence’ than a shift of optics. The activist humanitarians of MSF did not merely divert attention from global economic structures to individual rights violations on the part of states. Rather, their focus on human rights violations by postcolonial states was only one aspect of a concerted campaign against Third Worldism and the utopia embodied in the NIEO. The NIEO was not without limitations of its own, foremost among which was the relative neglect of inequalities within countries, but its failure was not simply a product of these internal limitations. Rather, its failure, as Umut Özsu notes, ‘was at root an affirmation of the weakness of public authority in the face of private power, the Global South in the face of the Global North, the developmental state in the face of the state legitimated market’.¹³³ In 1979, Hayek warned that the ‘strongest support of the trend towards socialism comes today from those who claim they want neither capitalism nor socialism but a ‘middle way’ or a ‘third world’.¹³⁴ To follow them, he argued, was a sure path to socialism, and ‘socialism as much as fascism or communism inevitably leads into the totalitarian state’.¹³⁵ Increasingly, the Third World vision of economic redistribution was viewed not only as economically suicidal but also as ‘totalitarian’.

Neoliberal Human Rights

While the human rights advocates of LSF mobilised neoliberal economic analyses to challenge Third Worldism and the NIEO, the neoliberal economists embraced the language of human rights. They soon saw that this new language, and the organisations that mobilised it to curtail the range of feasible political options and to license interventions into postcolonial societies, could bolster their own agenda of imposing market discipline on former colonies. Neoliberal human rights dispensed with the project of guaranteeing broad popular rights to basic welfare, but not with ‘economic rights’ per se. Rather, they saw in human rights the possibility of securing the rights of investors and the wealthy in the face of challenges to their property and power.¹³⁶ The human rights discourse they developed was not confined to property rights; it aimed to bolster the institutional and moral foundations of a competitive market economy and to shape entrepreneurial subjects. In contrast to those anticolonialists who had fought to establish the right to self-determination, the neoliberals saw the promise of human rights in constraining sovereign power, especially in the post-colony, and in restraining the politicisation of the economy.

In an article written with John O’Sullivan in 1977 – Moyn’s human rights ‘breakthrough’ year – Bauer explicitly mobilised the language of human rights to contest the NIEO. Under the heading ‘Human Rights in the Third World’, Bauer and Sullivan contended: ‘Western liberal opinion has been strangely and culpably blind to the extent of the persecution of economically productive, perhaps relatively well-off but politically unpopular, minorities’.¹³⁷ This account of the human rights abuses carried out by postcolonial states merges cases of assault on classical civil and political liberties with violations of economic (or market) freedoms. Third World governments, they argued, had persecuted minorities, discriminated against them in employment, and conducted expulsions and ‘even massacre’. They had suppressed freedom of the press, engaged in forced collectivisation of agriculture, restricted the inflow of foreign capital, established state monopolies and restrictive licensing of economic activities, and suppressed private firms. It was these human rights abuses, Bauer and O’Sullivan argued, that had resulted in the ‘poverty and economic backwardness’ of Third World societies.¹³⁸

The treatment of abuses of civil rights on the same plane as the licensing of economic activity or the establishment of state monopolies reflected the refusal of the neoliberals to view the economy as a separate sphere, distinct from the political. Rather than an economy inhabited by egoistic ‘man’ and a political sphere inhabited by abstract citizens, the neoliberals argued that economic control was ‘not merely control of a sector of human life which can be separated from the rest, it is the control of the means for all our ends’.¹³⁹ Securing freedom therefore required the shaping of a competitive market and the use of rights to protect the sphere of individual’s means from political intervention. In contrast to the common argument that the entrenchment of neoliberalism saw the decline of ‘social and economic rights’, neoliberals had their own distinctive account of ‘economic rights’. These were not the rights to food, clothing, housing and education enshrined in the UDHR, which sought to offer some protection from market forces. On the contrary, neoliberal ‘economic rights’ sought to protect the market freedom of private capital.

The neoliberal rejection of politics did not entail a rejection of government intervention or an advocacy of laissez-faire; on the contrary, it implied what Bauer termed ‘state action on a wide scale’.¹⁴⁰ Rewriting Adam Smith’s invisible hand, Bauer stressed the necessity to devise suitable institutions to harness selfish interests to the general interest. The premise of neoliberal thought was that the institutional structure profoundly influences the operation of the economic system, and ‘does not arise from the operation of the system itself’.¹⁴¹ Neoliberalism countenanced a significant role for state action in relation to the market, as Foucault noted; but this action served to secure the conditions for the market, not to compensate for its effects.¹⁴² What Foucault missed, as he prepared his lectures on neoliberalism, was the extent to which the new interventionist politics of human rights, which fascinated him at the time, shared in the dominant ‘state phobia’ (which conflated state welfarism with totalitarianism) that he portrayed as his time’s inheritance from a previous generation of neoliberals.¹⁴³

Foucault’s designation of neoliberalism as a form of state phobia is thus misleading; the neoliberals were not phobic of the state per se, but only of its role in reducing differentials in income, which Bauer warned could only be achieved by ‘a quasi-totalitarian power’.¹⁴⁴ Like Moynihan, Bauer criticised the failure of Western delegates to oppose the NIEO – but he went much further, protesting that Moynihan’s ‘conciliatory remarks towards the Third World on the alleged damage to it by Western exploitation and ethnic discrimination are inappropriate’.¹⁴⁵ Allegations of exploitation were not only untrue, but positively harmful to the Third World, he argued, as they diverted attention from the personal and social causes of material progress and encouraged the view that incomes were extracted rather than earned. In his own version of Hayek’s famous ‘road to serfdom’, Bauer argued that any concession to a belief in Western exploitation of former colonies legitimised severe maltreatment, including expropriation and massacre.

The politicisation of economic life was the central feature of Bauer’s account of totalitarianism, just as it was the central problem of the neoliberals in Chile. In his letter to Commentary, Bauer protested the ‘fanciful’ contention of ‘The United States in Opposition’ that Third Worldism was a variant of Fabian Socialism.¹⁴⁶ Moynihan’s vision of the Third World as ‘a brotherhood of gradually evolving Fabians’, he argued, obscured the blatant reality that it was in fact characterised by virulent antagonism to the West and the market system, and severe maltreatment, including expropriation and massacre, of millions of people. Despite rejecting this account of Third Worldism as a form of Fabianism, he nonetheless held late British colonial policy responsible for the politicisation of economic life in the former colonies. At the end of the British Empire, he argued, updating earlier neoliberal criticisms of Britain’s Fabian-inspired post-war colonial policy, limited government had been replaced by economic controls and ‘the ready-made framework of a dirigiste or even totalitarian state was handed over by the British to the incoming independent governments’.¹⁴⁷ Bauer’s commitment to a form of Hayek’s ‘Road to Serfdom’ thesis meant he saw little meaningful distinction between reformist socialism and totalitarianism: J. A. Hobson’s Imperialism (1902) led directly to Lenin’s Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916), he argued, then on to the denunciation of neocolonialism penned by Nkrumah, and ultimately to the totalitarian state.

While the lines of influence that pass from Hobson to Lenin to Nkrumah are real enough, the point of Bauer’s genealogy was to characterise capitalism as peaceful and nonviolent, and any politicisation of the economy in the name of equality as requiring ‘world government with totalitarian powers’.¹⁴⁸ In this, Bauer joined the long lineage of neoliberal attacks on Marxist theories of imperialism that stretch back to the 1930s (see Chapter 3). Against Lenin’s claim that imperialism was a phenomenon of capitalism in its monopoly stage, the neoliberals argued that imperialism was a distortion of the peaceful economic relations of capitalism caused by the politicisation of the economy. The real cause of inter-state conflict and colonialism, they argued, was the erosion of the liberal distinction between sovereignty and property, which had made territorial control the necessary precondition for the utilisation of the natural resources of a country. Following in the lineage of Lionel Robbins’s claim that finance capital was a pacifying influence, Bauer sought to shift the blame for the pervasive violence of postcolonial societies from the economic system onto politics.¹⁴⁹

From this perspective, political intervention that sought to restrain or compensate for the results of the market would lead to coercion and conflict. Echoing this perspective, Bauer argued that, if successful, Third World demands for ‘wealth transfers’ would result in ‘the spread of totalitarian government and a further erosion of the position of the West’.¹⁵⁰ These results would be greatly exacerbated if international redistribution was combined with egalitarian domestic measures, as equality could only be achieved through ‘an immense extension of the use of the coercive power of governments over individuals’ in order to homogenise the diversity of existing nations and individuals.¹⁵¹ Underpinning the NIEO, Bauer identified a fundamental and unjustified ‘belief in the natural equality of man as an economic performer’.¹⁵² Rejecting this premise, he argued that political action to equalise living standards ‘implies extensive forcible remodelling of peoples and societies, far-reaching coercion, and wholesale politicisation of life’.¹⁵³

For the human rights advocates, who situated themselves within the broader anti-totalitarian movement, such an argument tied the defence of human rights to the active rejection of economic equality. Brauman attributed his own discovery of the problem of totalitarianism to Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, which he read in the period in which he founded LSF.¹⁵⁴ By then, anti-totalitarianism was already pervasive among French intellectuals who were breaking with communism and with their previous anticolonial commitments. As early as 1978, Jacques Julliard had launched the media polemic against tiers-mondisme with an article that prophesied that, in Africa, there would be ‘no socialism except a totalitarian socialism’.¹⁵⁵ As critics noted at the time, the terms of this anti-tiers-mondiste condemnation of the postcolonial state replicated colonialist predictions about what would eventuate in the colonies if independence were achieved, depicting them as places of barbarism and oppression.¹⁵⁶ The anti-totalitarianism of LSF had less in common with Arendt’s work on totalitarianism, which she depicted as a phenomenon of imperialism, than with that of the neoliberals, for whom socialism led straight to totalitarianism.¹⁵⁷ Increasingly, the Third World vision of economic redistribution appeared to be not only economically suicidal, but also a ‘totalitarian’ threat to human rights.

We cannot understand the neoliberal victory if we view it only in economic terms. The success of neoliberalism was not predicated merely on its arguments for the superior efficiency of markets, or its challenges to the economics of socialist planning. Rather, neoliberals pioneered a series of political arguments about the dangers of wealth redistribution, interference with the market and mass participation in politics, especially in the post-colony, that helped to legitimise austerity and the crushing of Third Worldist demands for global wealth redistribution. These arguments were taken up enthusiastically by the humanitarians of LSF. The power of a small humanitarian NGO cannot be compared to the combined weight of the G7 countries and the Bretton Woods institutions, who also took aim at the NIEO in this period. The humanitarians nonetheless played an important role in shifting responsibility for Third World poverty away from the legacy of colonialism and the neocolonial framework of the global economy, and onto the leaders of individual Third World states.

It is true, as Brauman reflected decades later, that, in attacking residual Third Worldism in the mid 1980s, LSF ‘attacked a very weak adversary’.¹⁵⁸ But the central LSF contribution was the one its introductory materials laid out clearly: humanitarians could provide a moral argument that would make international liberalism acceptable to First World ‘progressives’ who, in the wake of the wars in Vietnam, Algeria, Kenya and elsewhere, generally remained critical of direct imperialist intervention and accepted Third Worldist critiques of the world economy. LSF’s introductory materials warned that, by focusing their attention on the superior economic efficiency of liberalism, its advocates had ceded the ground of justice and generosity to their left-wing opponents, and raised the suspicion that they were merely defending selfish (class) interests. Humanitarians, LSF wagered, were better equipped than ‘the specialists of the economy, politics or business’ to win an argument that liberalism is not simply conducive to economic growth, but in fact the only system capable of securing justice and liberty.¹⁵⁹ The humanitarians lent their moral prestige to what the Heritage Foundation called the ‘free enterprise ideological counter-attack’ on Third Worldism and the NIEO. Their key impact was on the terrain of political idealism, as they helped long-cherished right-wing themes cross over to the political left, and re-signified state-led redistribution as a totalitarian threat to liberty and human rights.

Looking back on the history of LSF, a decade after it was dissolved in 1989, Brauman reflected: ‘We realised that our ideas no longer shocked anyone. They had become commonplace. Third-Worldism was dead.’¹⁶⁰ Almost twenty years later, in a context of rising concern for the economic equality brought about by decades of neoliberal reforms, Brauman reflected in 2015: ‘I see myself and the small group that I brought together as a kind of symptom of the rise of neoliberalism … We had the conviction that we were a kind of intellectual vanguard, but no’, he laughed, ‘we were just following the rising tendency’.¹⁶¹ I have suggested that this assessment is, if anything, too modest: rather than being a symptom, the humanitarians who founded LSF explicitly mobilised the language of human rights in order to contest the vision of substantive equality that defined the Third Worldist project and the NIEO. They were not powerless companions of the rising neoliberals, but active, enthusiastic and influential fellow-travellers. Their special contribution was to pioneer a distinctly neoliberal human rights discourse, for which a competitive market order accompanied by a liberal institutional structure was truly the last utopia.¹⁶²

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