PART II
7
SAMUEL MOYN
How do we answer an Indochinese or an Arab who reminds us that he has seen a lot of our arms but not much of our humanism?
—Maurice Merleau-Ponty, 1946
“All men are created equal, they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” The famous words are not—at least not directly—from a passage midway through the second paragraph of the American Declaration of Independence of 1776. Instead, they open Ho Chi Minh’s Vietnamese Declaration of Independence, issued September 2, 1945, scant weeks after his country’s Japanese occupiers had been brought to their knees, and before the bitter reimposition of French colonial rule, with British assistance and American connivance.1 In fact, as far back as May, in communication with his covert American Office of Strategic Services handlers, before the common interest of defeating Japanese imperialism had dissipated, Ho had been seeking the proper first principles of anticolonialism in American history. According to the testimony of Lieutenant Dan Phelan about a conversation that month, Ho “kept asking me if I could remember the language of our Declaration. I was a normal American, I couldn’t … The more we discussed it, the more he actually seemed to know about it than I did.”2
The moment sums up the historical connection between anticolonialism and rights in miniature—but only if interpreted correctly. For however remembered, the eighteenth-century American Declaration had not really been about rights; it had, above all, been about achieving postcolonial sovereignty externally, not asserting rights internationally, or even internally. “The Declaration’s statements regarding rights,” historian David Armitage has gone so far as to assert, “were strictly subordinate to … claims regarding the rights of states, and were taken to be so by contemporaries, when they deigned to notice the assertion of individual rights at all.” The rights talk of the Declaration only received emphasis later, not least—Armitage says—with “the advent of a global rights movement in the second half of the twentieth century.”3 But it was not to be Ho Chi Minh or other activists against empire who inaugurated that movement: after citing the Declaration’s “immortal statement,” he immediately continued: “In a broader sense, this now means: All the peoples have a right to live, to be happy and free.” The utopia that still mattered most was the original American one: postcolonial, collective liberation from empire, not individual rights canonized in international law.
How does anticolonialism, which drove the most liberatory events in the last and perhaps any century, fit in the emerging historiography of “human rights”? To put it briefly, not very well. Contemporary human rights history—a brand new enterprise—has tended to be teleological and triumphalist, ignoring the plurality of reformist ideologies in plausible contention through most of the past, before a set of mysterious set of events made human rights seem natural and necessary. Almost unanimously, historians have so far adopted a celebratory attitude toward the emergence and progress of human rights, providing recent enthusiasms with uplifting backstories and differing primarily about whether to locate the true breakthrough with the Greeks or the Jews, medieval Christians or early modern philosophers, democratic revolutionaries or abolitionist heroes, American internationalists or antiracist visionaries.4 They have been less ready to concede, in recasting world history as raw material for progressive ascent of recent beliefs, that the past is never best read as a slow preparation for the present—and that human rights, even once invented, have been only one appealing ideology among others. One might argue that what succeeds about the very best work in the field is due to the extent it gives up a teleological and triumphalist credentialing model that still overwhelmingly dominates.5 Anticolonialism provides another valuable illustration of this conclusion—if, that is, anticolonialism is not forced into participating in the “human rights revolution” that, in fact, it avoided for historically understandable reasons (and which is a recent historiographical construction in any case).
What ought to be the most striking and sobering fact, after all, is that anticolonial activists rarely invoked the phrase “human rights” or appealed to the Universal Declaration in particular—though decolonization was exploding precisely at the moment of its passage and after.6 In a powerful body of historiography, tales are told of seizures from below of the formal universalisms of dominant peoples, classes, and nations, and presented simply as the realization of their original, truncated forms. Laurent Dubois makes such a claim about the Haitian Revolution, and Lynn Hunt, in her book on the same era, speaks similarly of a cascading “logic of rights.” The argument, also offered by Frederick Cooper in perhaps its most general form, makes a fundamental point about how promises can be moved from paper into politics.7 This chapter explores why, in the years immediately following World War II, no such logic of rights obtained—or rather, why an earlier, more powerful cascade, the liberation of collective peoples, flooded away the possibility of its occurrence, for better or worse.
After examining the coincidence of powerful causes that explain the absence of the new human rights in anticolonialism, this chapter turns to look at how they entered into a crucial United Nations debate. The UN was the only real place where anticolonialism and human rights intersected, but the question from the beginning was which would define which, and the answer seems clear. In the end, the true lesson of anticolonialism—the agent of the greatest dissemination of sovereignty in world history, not of its qualification—is thus not about the inevitable ascent of human rights. It is about the ideological conditions in which human rights in their contemporary connotations became a plausible and globalizing doctrine after the mid-1970s. In sum, recent attempts to place anticolonialism in human rights history must first face up to an era when the human rights idea had no movement and anticolonialism, a powerful movement, used other concepts.
Of course, anticolonialism in postwar history, though it achieved almost unbelievable successes, did not come out of nowhere. Yet, unlike some First World movements that appealed to rights language, like the women’s movement and (less frequently) the workers’ movement, anticolonialists rarely framed their cause that way before World War II. After all, colonial subjects were presumably well aware that Western “humanism” had not been kind to them so far.8 The Ligue des droits de l’Homme, the French civil liberties union, staged a debate on the topic of the relation of colonization to the rights of man in 1931, but the conclusions were predictably self-serving. “To bring Science to people who do not have it, to give them roads, canals, railroads, cars, telegraph, telephone, to organize public health services for them, and—last but not least—to communicate the Rights of Man to them,” as one speaker proclaimed, “is a task of fraternity.”9 True, activists sometimes appealed to legal (including judicial) remedies accorded them by the domestic legal systems in which they were working; British and French law, with their hierarchical distinction between the law governing the metropole and the law governing the colony, provided legal rights, at least on paper, to all subjects of their respective empires. As an illuminating recent study of prewar Nigeria suggests, domestic civil liberties traditions could and did have the potential to be transplanted to colonial holdings and appropriated for unexpected use. But there were no human rights prior to World War II except those concretized domestically by the state, so it is unclear how serious a bridge such prewar activities could have provided, or did in fact, to allegiance to postwar human rights. There is no neglecting the sharp distinction, both conceptually and historically, between early rights or even the rights of man, on the one hand, and later human rights, on the other.10 The former were given their meaning by a status of citizen, or at least subject, within states and empires. The latter established nothing comparable, certainly not at the time of their invention (and perhaps not since).11
In any case, the most critical fact is that their interwar formation left opponents of empire with a range of ideologies, few of which were naturally open to the human rights moment of the mid-1940s or needed it for inspiration or articulation. After 1918, only, or mainly, one right was to matter. Erez Manela has provided a microscopic history of how enthusiastically the promise of the self-determination of peoples was greeted in the aftermath of World War I, but its true era of triumph was to be delayed until the 1940s and after. It was Woodrow Wilson, without leaving out V. I. Lenin, who created the conditions for an anticolonialism in which international human rights—in any case not yet formulated as an idea—were not the goal, with only one outsized (and collective) right cherished over others.12 Indeed, though anticolonialism as self-determination may have had its international origins at that older moment, the key fact is that this framing of anticolonial aspirations proved strong enough to outlast any attempt after World War II to substitute a new language of international order and legitimacy based on personal rights. Put differently, the “Wilsonian moment,” though stymied in the immediate aftermath of World War I, had a second, more successful chance after World War II, and it meant that there was no remotely comparable “human rights moment” at that time. Thus, the case of the decolonizing or soon-to-decolonize world after 1945 suggests clearly that not all formal universalisms spark seizures from below of their unrealized potential. Perhaps more than on any internal logic, the history of universalistic concepts like human rights ultimately depends on how rival human actors choose to deploy them, for good or for ill.
Could things have been otherwise? The question is tantalizing, but what seems obvious is that a clearer picture of the course of Western diplomacy and its reception elsewhere makes it counterfactual and ahistorical in the extreme. The Atlantic Charter of 1941 had announced self-determination, but not human rights, as part of the Allied war aims, even if Churchill and Roosevelt differed on what that meant. For Churchill, it applied to the liberation of Hitler’s empire, not empire generally, and certainly not Churchill’s empire. Roosevelt had originally more generous views. “There are many kinds of Americans, of course,” FDR told Churchill at a dinner in 1942, “but as a people, as a country, we’re opposed to imperialism—we can’t stomach it.” But he came to agree with his ally by the time of his death.13 It is clear that the Atlantic Charter, especially, did have great resonance throughout the world. But later, to the extent that anyone paid attention, human rights must have seemed like a substitute for self-determination—which the Universal Declaration crucially does not include. Ho, who initially begged his American interlocutors to live up to the Atlantic Charter’s promise of self-determination rather than allow the French to return, stopped asking and never again made even declaratory rights central.14
Such typically neglected facts are a glaring problem for a recent body of scholarship that presents the period after 1941 as a moment when America revived or invented its best internationalist traditions, in a genuinely universalistic spirit—offering what Elizabeth Borgwardt calls the “new deal for the world” in the American construction of the postwar order. She goes so far as to label the Atlantic Charter a “human rights instrument,” though it didn’t include the phrase, that set the terms for all the generosity that followed; “when you state a moral principle,” she concludes of the Atlantic Charter’s fate in inspiring the new order of San Francisco, Nuremberg, and elsewhere, “you are stuck with it.”15 Things look somewhat different, far less heroic and certainly less stalwart, from outside the West, where the announced principle of the Atlantic Charter, self-determination, is one the Americans decided they did not have to be stuck with after all. It would have been surprising if colonized peoples had been galvanized by the new human rights, if they were really successors of and substitutes for self-determination—in the nature of a consolation prize. Contrary to historian Paul Kennedy’s assumption that the Universal Declaration, at the very late date of 1948, “enjoyed enormous global attention,” the idea of human rights had strikingly little global circulation compared to other concepts, including other emancipatory universalisms.16 A fair survey shows overwhelmingly that human rights failed to be embedded in global ideology at the time. Across the globe the Atlantic Charter galvanized a great many, but human rights fell on deaf ears; their differential history is what matters, and it is not hard to understand why.
This is not to say that the search for the nation-state was the only actual or possible future in the anticolonialist imaginary—far from it. It is only to say that specific appeal to supranational values encapsulated in the new human rights failed to affect it decisively. Even the crucial short-term developments after the Atlantic Charter must be set against the background of a long-fermenting anticolonialism: by the time human rights came on the scene, in other words, the train had already left the station. Interestingly, for instance, Mohandas Gandhi—often represented in retrospect as a partisan of human rights—found nothing new to take from the new rhetoric. Starting long before, he could interpret satyagraha as designed so as to win the rights of Englishmen for all British subjects (so long as they could be corrected through their correlation with duties). Yet there is no record of Gandhi mentioning, much less celebrating, the new idea of human rights in the era after the Atlantic Charter; he responded to a UNESCO request for his version of the idea—the assumption being that he must have one—with puzzlement, and his assassination in the beginning of the year whose end would see the Universal Declaration makes the question of what he might have seen in them, and done with them, unanswerable.17 Similarly, except for his enthusiasm for a UN petition to safeguard Indians living in South Africa, Jawaharlal Nehru—who leavened a healthy internationalist vision with realist pragmatism—hardly invoked international rights, even when he addressed the General Assembly in Paris a month before the Universal Declaration’s passage.18
The anticolonialism of many others was similarly fully formed before the human rights rhetoric after World War II had a chance to impact it seriously. Prominent anticolonialists like Ahmed Sukarno of Indonesia and Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt had itineraries that never crossed the terrain of postwar human rights, with the former an alumnus of the interwar League against Imperialism and the latter preoccupied with other things on the road to his 1952 coup, not least fighting in Palestine much of the year the Universal Declaration was being finalized. Often, the origins of anticolonialist ideology were due to tiny groups, characteristically on the far left, and in student or immigrant networks in metropoles, forging diverse compromises between nationalism and internationalism. A frequent result, of course, was the fateful connection of anticolonialism and communism that so colored twentieth-century history. And while communism had its own culture of invoking rights, especially in 1934–36 and again in the immediate post–World War II moment, those who saw in communism the best choice for liberation from empire (an earlier episode of activation by Wilsonian idealism having proved a bitter disappointment) were not seriously marked by that culture in any era. The nationalist government of China participated to some extent in early human rights formulation at the UN, but its toppling spelled the end of any ideological association of China with human rights. As for Southeast Asia, the Atlantic Charter had provided renewed grounds for Wilsonian hopes, but these were quickly dashed as the British rushed to reestablish empire throughout the region in the chaotic months after Japanese defeat. The British were eventually failures in many places, but restored the French Indochinese empire en passant and asserted control over Malaysia by conducting a savage counterinsurgency at the precisely the moment the move toward the Universal Declaration was occurring half a world away.19
If anything, the continuing course of anticolonial struggles confirmed these trends, not least due to the growing force of Marxism in anticolonialist thought. At the Bandung Conference of 1955 and elsewhere, anticolonialists announced their own internationalism, but in a subaltern key that incorporated nationalism and forged ties of idealism across borders based on racial identity and African or “Afro-Oriental” subordination. Kwame Nkrumah, who as far back as 1945 had not mentioned human rights in the celebrated Declaration to the Colonial Peoples of the World of the Manchester Pan-African Congress, claimed only the “rights of all people to govern themselves.”20 The effect of Ghana’s early independence on the political aspirations of other sub-Saharan Africans was determining and, above all, in the priority accorded self-determination among all other possible aims: “Seek ye first the political kingdom,” in Nkrumah’s famous slogan, “and everything else shall be added unto you.” It was in this atmosphere that C. L. R. James’s revival of the “Black Jacobins” of the French Revolution had such power, especially since—unlike later historians of Caribbean radicalism—he had managed to present Toussaint L’Ouverture and his confederates without thinking to suggest they had been human rights activists before their time. A Trotskyist, James’s view of droits de l’homme, interestingly, seems to have been as the “wordy” promises of “eloquent phrasemakers” who, driven by the true economic motor of history to “perorate,” are in the end only willing to give up the aristocracy of the skin at the point of the insurgent’s gun.21 There were exceptions, but most typically, anticolonialists followed him in these views, whether Marxist or not, and there is almost no record of anyone taking the human rights of the new United Nations seriously. When founded in 1963, the Organization of African Unity’s charter made reference to human rights but subordinated them to the need “to safeguard and consolidate the hard-won independence as well as the sovereignty and territorial integrity, of our States, and to fight against neo-colonialism in all its forms.”
The case of French negritude is perhaps slightly different, as some of its partisans were willing to entertain hopes in the immediate postwar period, after the Brazzaville conference, for a France that might finally include them as equals. Thus, on occasion the great French tradition of droits de l’homme was, even in the angriest texts, held out as perverted rather than false. “That is the great thing I hold against pseudo-humanism,” Aimé Césaire, the Martinique poet, wrote in his classic Discourse on Colonialism of 1950, “that for too long it has diminished rights of man, that its concept of those rights has been—and still is—narrow and fragmentary, incomplete and biased and, all things considered, sordidly racist.”22 The background mattered. Historian Gary Wilder has shown that this proposal for an alternative and realized humanism developed in dialogue with the interwar project of colonial reform, and for Césaire, as for theorist of negritude (and later Senegalese president) Léopold Senghor, it did not necessarily imply colonial autonomy in the beginning.23 The founder of negritude advocated an inspiring vision in which a return to and revival of cultural particularity would contribute to, not interfere with, a universal civilization that deserved the name. Through the 1950s, he hoped France could provide it; yet neither Césaire nor Senghor ever referred to the human rights of the international scene. Later, after Senegalese independence, the focus of Senghor’s thought, like that of so many others, was the development of a noncommunist Africanist socialism. The general infiltration of Marxism into anticolonialism, which increased after the mid-1960s, did not change the exclusionary equation and a self-styled “humanism” tolerant toward violence prevailed. For French Algerian anticolonialist Frantz Fanon, it was “a question of starting a new history of Man, a history that will have regard for the sometimes prodigious thesis which Europe has put forward.”24 But human rights were not invoked as any part—much less the core principle—of that history.
But there was a final and equally important reason that the human rights announced by the Allies failed to restructure the anticolonial imagination, which is that the United Nations, far from being the forum of a new and liberatory set of principles, appeared set at first on colluding in the attempted reimposition of colonial rule after the war. “Remember that Dumbarton Oaks”—the documents of the first plans of the organization—“leaves 750,000,000 human beings outside the organization of humanity,” African-American anticolonialist W. E. B. Du Bois commented bitterly in spring 1945.25 As if the Atlantic Charter had never been, those documents, indeed, did not even mention self-determination (or human rights). And, in spite of trying, anticolonialists were not to succeed in shaking the organization’s complicity in the attempted continuation of colonialism, as its initial formulation occurred.
There was agitation to do so, of course, especially after the United States turned to agree by the time of Yalta to the restrictive British interpretation of the Atlantic Charter; however, the high politics did not center on whether to end colonialism outright. Instead, they involved debates on the exact terms of the reinvention of the League of Nations system of mandates, the key question being whether international supervision would cover all dependent areas, or whether its supervision would have teeth. These attempts largely failed, drastically restricting the coverage of the trusteeship system and, within it, largely reinstating the weak supervisory authority of the international community of the League era. Only a tenth of colonial subjects at the height of postwar empire was under trusteeship authority; and even then, as outlined in the UN Charter’s Chapters XII–XIII, the organization’s main aim of preserving the peace trumped the “sacred trust” advanced countries were supposed to have in the interests of subject populations, which did not include any definite obligation to move them toward independence.26 Compared to the Dumbarton Oaks proposals, the concept of self-determination did enter the UN Charter twice, but only in a rhetorical and subsidiary way. (Human rights also entered at this stage, if mainly ornamentally, especially in the preamble drafted by South African marshal Jan Christian Smuts—who revealingly assumed they had no implication for racial hierarchy in his country or elsewhere.)27
Surprisingly, anticolonialism prevailed anyway, no thanks to the United Nations processes, which it nonetheless affected so quickly that it came as a shock. It would have been impossible to predict this in 1945, or even in the brutal postwar years when the Universal Declaration’s framing was a sideshow compared to the world reimposition of empire. The British suppression of insurrection in Malaysia, at the very moment of that framing, would prove a model for other countries, indeed, through the American struggle in Vietnam, but its success did not become the rule. Anticolonial victory, through force of arms or (more often) negotiated departures, did. The era of the “new states” had begun.28
It was mainly on the stage of UN processes that any intersection of anticolonialism and human rights occurred, which must be understood as transpiring on the former’s terms and not the latter’s. By the time of the 1948 vote on the Universal Declaration, fifty-eight states were UN members, a number which would grow by leaps and bounds, to the point that within a few short years an Afro-Asian bloc in the General Assembly could outvote First World powers with Soviet help and after another few years (most notably, after 1960, when sixteen African nations entered) with no help at all. In twenty years, the number of humans under some sort of colonial rule declined from 750 million to fewer than 40 million.29 Though this transition would have been unforeseeable in 1945, by a decade later great power observers already understood that anticolonialism would have undoubted effects. After Bandung, where representatives of so many originally and still-excluded peoples attended, the likely outcome was clear. One depressed British analyst predicted that the newly independent nations would “use the success of the conference as a means of asserting the Arab/Asian point of view and of claiming that the Bandung countries were entitled to a far bigger share of the world authority (as represented by the UN) than they had when the United Nations was founded.”30
If that entitlement meant the development or entrenchment of something called human rights, it was only in a sense subordinate—if not equivalent—to self-determination. What was perhaps remarkable is that at first there was no doctrinal or organizational connection at the UN between human rights as a project and dependent areas as a problem, with the minor exception of the trusteeship system. But the pressure—and bit by bit, the continuing accession—of the new nations changed this entirely. In an astonishingly short space of time, the UN moved from seriously considering a proposal to exempt colonial (trust and non-self-governing) territories from coverage by the draft Covenants on Human Rights to placing the right of self-determination of peoples first of all human rights in those drafts. These debates—which fundamentally transformed the whole meaning of United Nations human rights for decades—are worth following in more detail.
In October 1950, the General Assembly’s Third Committee gathered to consider whether colonial powers could bind themselves to human rights in a prospective legal covenant, without fearing that this would increase the basis on which the UN could interfere in their affairs. For the Belgian representative, it was a necessary premise for moving to binding covenant, because human rights rules “presupposed a high degree of civilization, [and] were often incompatible with the ideas of peoples who had not yet reached a high degree of development. By imposing those rules on them at once, one ran the risk of destroying the very basis of their society. It would be an attempt to lead them abruptly to the point which the civilized nations of today had only reached after a lengthy period of development.”31 René Cassin and Eleanor Roosevelt, icons of the human rights moment at the early United Nations, agreed, speaking for the French and American governments. But this proposal to keep the applicability of human rights law out of empires did not carry the day.
Meanwhile, the same year, the General Assembly approved a resolution from Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia that the Human Rights Commission explore how self-determination could be taken more seriously.32 The idea that the right of self-determination should be injected into the substance of the covenant, though it had not figured in the Universal Declaration, caused a sensational debate, first in the Third Committee in late 1951 and then in the General Assembly’s plenary session in early 1952. The Belgian delegate, Fernand Dehousse, posed his objection as a worry about the “multiplication of frontiers and barriers among nations,” with self-determination an artifact of nineteenth-century economic liberalism, now overridden by “the idea of international solidarity.”33 The inclusion of self-determination, he argued, could not be used simply to score points against colonial powers. Abdul Rahman Pazhwak of Afghanistan replied angrily on this point that he and other supporters of self-determination as a right “did not want to teach anyone lessons; it was history that taught them,” not least “that under the rule of Powers which regarded themselves as qualified to teach others lessons the world had known oppression, aggression and bloodshed.”34 Self-determination, Kolli Tamba of Liberia insisted, “was an essential right and stood above all other rights.”35 At the plenary session, right before the vote, the Saudi Arabian representative, Jamil Baroody, gave a long and impassioned argument for making it the first right: “The anguished cry for freedom and liberation from the foreign yoke in many parts of the world has risen to a very high pitch, so that even those who had been compelled to block their ears with the cotton wool of political expediency can no longer deny that they can hear it. [The world’s people] cannot enjoy any human rights unless they are free, and it is in a document like the covenant that self-determination should be proclaimed.”36 The General Assembly approved the directive to include in the post-Declaration human rights covenants the article that “All peoples shall have the right of self-determination,” where a later version remains today, as the very first article in both the chief international legal document protecting civil and political rights and the one protecting economic and social rights.37
Whether one celebrates or rues this fateful day, the absorption of human rights accomplished on it transformed their meaning, so as to emphasize their necessary basis in collectivity and sovereignty, as the first and most important threshold right. And while treating self-determination as a premise for excluding from consideration other rights at the United Nations forum did not have to follow logically, it typically did so in practice. But above all, it changed them conceptually, through the move to collective sovereignty that would later seem the very barrier the concept of human rights was intended to overcome. In immediate response, Clyde Eagleton, New York University international lawyer, lobbed a critique in Foreign Affairs entitled “Excesses of Self-Determination.” “It is sad that anti-colonial resentment,” he wrote, “should have distorted so noble a principle.”38 So it was that the same international lawyers ultimately to champion human rights spent most of postwar history treating them as captured and dangerous. In the 1960s Louis Henkin—Columbia University law professor who in the 1970s championed human rights, in the process helping reclaim them from their anticolonialist definition—simply denounced their postwar interpretation “as an additional weapon against colonialism although there was no suggestion that [self-determination] was a right of the individual, that the individual could claim it against an unrepresentative government, or that minorities could invoke it.”39 For the time being, however, as another critic put it, self-determination had become “a shibboleth that all must pronounce to identify themselves with the virtuous.”40 As new states joined, a third complained the UN concern with human rights became nothing “but another vehicle for advancing [the] attack on colonialism and associated forms of racial discrimination.”41
Most obviously, the epoch-making Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples of 1960 (first proposed by Nikita Khrushchev personally in that “African Year,” so called because of the wave of accessions from there) confirmed the near equivalence of human rights and self-determination. “The colonial system … is now an international crime,” Amilcar Cabral, Guinean scourge of Portuguese domination, exulted, in response. “Our struggle has lost its strictly national character and has moved to an international level.”42 Fatefully, this internationalization coincided with the Sharpeville massacre in South Africa, which amplified the country’s stigmatization and led to a number of UN resolutions on human rights grounds.43 This was not progress for human rights in their current sense, but evidence of their entanglement with anticolonialism and antiracism more generally. Indeed, even as Portuguese Angola also came in for immediate attention, India explicitly cited the 1960 declaration in its December 1961 invasion of Goa. In 1962, explaining how best to honor the fifteenth anniversary of the Universal Declaration, the General Assembly approved a resolution effectively identifying the celebration of the advancement of human rights with that of the attainment of independence from colonial rule, with the hope for the future realization of human rights defined as another “decisive step forward for the liberation of all peoples.”44 The Declaration on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination was proclaimed in the same spirit the following year, with a convention following two years later, and approved the very same day as the remarkable paean to self-determination the Declaration on the Inadmissibility of Intervention in the Domestic Affairs of States and the Protection of Their Independence and Sovereignty.45 Such declarations became focal points of—and dominant imaginative rubrics for—human rights activities at the United Nations, in a widespread alteration of institutional arrangements and in endless discussion, with South Africa and (later) Israel repeated targets of attention.46 Postcolonial sovereignty—linked to subaltern internationalism, and thus abrogable only in an antiracist cause—had prevailed, to the point of defining what human rights, too, meant.
It is crucial to maintain clarity about the differences between the earlier forms of idealism and activism and a later and very different idealism and activism—the human rights of more recent times. The relationship is far more one of displacement than it is one of realization. Anticolonialism did not contribute to the triumph of an idealism that privileged the antitotalitarian values at the center of the explosion in the prominence of “human rights” in the 1970s and since. In fact, anticolonialism’s most characteristic concern, collective national or regional or, indeed, racial liberation, found itself in the human rights movement only to the extent it could accommodate individual civil liberties, with the problem of social and economic disempowerment suppressed as an imperative until a “second generation” moment allowed for their attempted incorporation. This is not to gainsay either of two complications, the existence of a few who argued for an anticolonialism based on human rights (typically on condition of siding with the United States in its Cold War struggle for hearts and minds around the world), and strategic invocations of human rights in international forums in response to the brutal methods the colonial powers deployed in trying to maintain control, for example against French torture in the Algerian war.47 But for better or worse, neither complication defined the historical bearing of anticolonialism. And while this chapter focused on ideology only, analogous questions would make the point even more clearly if practices, including First World sympathy, were given attention. Anticolonialism placed emphasis on totalistic struggle—nonviolent or violent—and elicited Third-Worldist engagement from its partisans in wealthy countries. It played little role in the rise of international law as the privileged steward of norms. And it did little to make publicity the essential form of moral activism, especially in a model in which mass political involvement, if there was any, occurred either through personal or small-group identification with foreign suffering or through arm’s length financial contribution. Finally, it is unclear how anticolonalism, with its famous iconic leaders, could have helped spark a model of nongovernmental politics in which elite leadership took on the characteristics of bureaucracy rather than charisma.48
The best use of anticolonialism in the history of human rights, then, is to think about why the latter waited for so long, until living memory, to crystallize. In other words, the main rationale for returning to anticolonialism within human rights history is not to incorporate it but to discern some reasons why human rights failed to win out in the 1940s and after, but experienced a remarkable ascendancy in the later 1970s and since. As it would turn out, human rights entered First World consciousness only, and perhaps conveniently, once two interlocking events occurred.
First, the sordid nature of formal colonial rule had to be revealed for all to accept and ultimately ended once and for all. The hard fact to contemplate is that human rights experienced their triumph as a global lingua franca after decolonization, not during it—and because of it, perhaps, only in the sense that the loss of empire allowed for the reclamation of liberalism shorn of its depressing earlier entanglements with formal rule abroad. The last major instances of formal colonialism, in the Portuguese holdings, were finally destroyed in the mid-1970s. The simultaneous failure of its bloody, last-ditch attempt to keep southern Vietnam—not simply the moral turpitude or deviation from national traditions of that failure, as Jimmy Carter contended at the time—set the stage for America’s promised turn to human rights as a foreign policy ideal. One speculative hypothesis anticolonialism allows to be advanced, then, is that only the ideological dissociation of liberalism and empire, after more than a century of long and deep connection, paved the way for the rise of human rights. Scholars still debate whether liberalism has a genetic or only contingent relationship to imperialism, but what does seem clear is that only when formal empire ended did in fact (and perhaps could in theory) a powerful internationalism based on rights come to the fore.
Second, the widespread rise of the belief that anticolonialism in its classic forms had shipwrecked as a moral and political project also mattered a great deal. This was not least because of concerns once thought legitimately placed on hold while new states consolidated power and, assuming their leaders’ good intentions, attempted radical social and economic reconstructions that might matter. It meant much, especially, that the anticolonialism of self-determination bred mounting secession crises. Even one partisan of the spread of domestic liberties in the world’s multiplying constitutions could concede in the mid-1960s that “autocracy, selectively applied, may be necessary in order to create the social requisites for the maintenance of human rights.”49 A decade later, that bet did not seem worth making. Harvard professor and longtime prominent proponent of self-determination Rupert Emerson decried by 1975 the emergence of “a double standard which has worked to debase the moral coinage of the Third-World countries and to lessen the appeal of the causes they advocate … The wholly legitimate drive against colonialism and apartheid was in some measure called into question when the new countries habitually shrugged off any concern with massive violations of human rights and dignity in their own domain.”50 In 1977, the year of greatest prominence of human rights in U.S. history so far, New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan more aggressively interpreted the ideals as a response to the “cult of the Third World” that had captured human rights at the United Nations, where Moynihan served as ambassador shortly before. Western policy had failed to stand up for human rights against their perverse redefinition, Moynihan explained, because of the “tremendous investment of hope in what we saw as the small seedlings of our various great oaks and a corresponding reluctance to think, much less speak, ill of them. Then there was the trauma of Vietnam, which perhaps made it seem even more necessary that we should be approved by nations so very like the one we were despoiling.”51 Now too much time had gone by to allow Third World nations a pass—and Vietnam was over. Only in such circumstances, it would seem, could there be an opening for a move, plausible or not, from the original and most lasting American contribution of postcolonial sovereignty to its far more recent utopia. It remains today’s utopia: the dream of a world of individual human rights.
NOTES
1. Ho Chi Minh, “Declaration of Independence of the Democratic Republic of Viet-Nam,” in On Revolution: Selected Writings 1920–66, ed. Bernard B. Fall (New York: Praeger, 1967), 143.
2. Cited in Dixee R. Bartholomew-Feis, The OSS and Ho Chi Minh: Unexpected Allies in the War against Japan (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2006), 243.
3. David Armitage, The Declaration of Independence: A Global History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 17–18. Similarly, Jack Rakove says, “in writing the preamble to the Declaration, Jefferson was seeking neither to strike a blow for the equality of individuals, nor to erase the countless social differences that the law sometimes created and often sustained. The primary form of equality that the preamble asserts is an equality among peoples, defined as self-governing communities.” Rakove, “Jefferson, Rights, and the Priority of Freedom of Conscience,” in The Future of Liberal Democracy: Thomas Jefferson and the Contemporary World, ed. Robert Fatton Jr. and R. K. Ramazani (New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2004), 51.
4. For some exemplary works, see Micheline Ishay, The History of Human Rights: From the Stone Age to the Globalization Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); Paul Gordon Lauren, The Evolution of International Human Rights: Visions Seen (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003); John M. Headley, The Europeanization of the World: On the Origins of Human Rights and Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007); Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights: A History (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007); Adam Hochschild, Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005); Jenny S. Martinez, “Antislavery Courts and the Dawn of International Human Rights Law,” Yale Law Journal 117, no. 4 (January 2008): 550–41; Elizabeth Borgwardt, A New Deal for the World: America’s Vision for Human Rights (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006); and Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), chap. 14.
5. See esp. Kenneth Cmiel’s “The Recent History of Human Rights,” in this volume. This is the overall approach of my The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010).
6. How, for example, could decolonization be described as “the greatest extension and achievement of human rights in the history of the world,” if its prime movers did not frame their aims and agenda using the language? Cited in Lauren, Evolution, 242.
7. Laurent Dubois, A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787–1804 (Raleigh: University of North Carolina Press 2004); Hunt, Inventing Human Rights.
8. Cf. Florence Bernault, “What Absence Is Made Of: Human Rights in Africa,” in Human Rights and Revolutions, ed. Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom et al. (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield 2000), esp. 128.
9. Cited in Raoul Girardet, L’idée coloniale en France (Paris: La Table Ronde 1972), 183.
10. In this sense, the title of Bonny Ibhawoh, Imperialism and Human Rights: Colonial Discourses of Rights and Liberties in African History (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007) is seriously misleading.
11. Compare Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, “Empire, droits, et citoyenneté, de 212 à 1946,” Annales E.S.C. 63, no. 3 (May 2008): 495–531.
12. Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).
13. On the interpretation of the Atlantic Charter by the Allies as the war continued, see Wm. Roger Louis, Imperialism at Bay: The United States and the Decolonization of the British Empire, 1941–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978). See also Neil Smith, American Empire: Roosevelt’s Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization (Berkeley: University of California Press 2003), ch. 13. FDR is cited in Robert Dallek, Franklin Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy 1932–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 324.
14. Efforts to add self-determination to the Universal Declaration were chiefly a concern of the Soviet and Eastern bloc delegates in the UN in 1947–48 and were rejected. See Kamleshwar Das, “Some Observations Relating to the International Bill of Human Rights,” Indian Yearbook of International Affairs 19 (1986): 12–15. For Ho, see William J. Duiker, Ho Chi Minh: A Life (New York, 2000), 341.
15. Borgwardt, New Deal, and Borgwardt, “‘When You State a Moral Principle, You Are Stuck With It’: The 1941 Atlantic Charter as a Human Rights Instrument,” Virginia Journal of International Law 46, no. 3 (Spring 2006): 501–62.
16. Paul Kennedy, The Parliament of Man: The Past, Present, and Future of the United Nations (New York: Random House 2006), 179. Among the Nigerians examined by Ibhawoh, “the introduction of the UDHR did not stimulate the kind of impassioned debates about the right to self-determination that followed the Atlantic Charter” (160). This is not surprising, given that the UDHR did not mention self-determination.
17. Mohandas Gandhi, “A Letter Addressed to the Secretary-General of UNESCO,” in Human Rights: Comments and Interpretations, ed. Jacques Maritain (New York: Columbia University Press 1948).
18. Jawaharlal Nehru, “To the United Nations” (November 1948), in Independence and After (Delhi: Day, 1949). Cf. G. S. Pathak, “India’s Contribution to the Human Rights Declaration and Covenants,” in Horizons of Freedom, ed. L. M. Singhvi (Delhi: National Publishing House, 1969). For a different account (whose main contribution, in spite of the title, is about Nehru’s aspirational globalism), Manu Bhagavan, “A New Hope: India, the United Nations and the Making of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” Modern Asian Studies 44, no. 2 (March 2010): 311–47.
19. For a panoramic view, see Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper, Forgotten Wars: Freedom and Revolution in Southeast Asia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), esp. 127, 141 for the impact of the Atlantic and UN Charters.
20. “Declaration to the Colonial Peoples of the World,” in Kwame Nkrumah, Revolutionary Path (New York: International Publishers, 1973).
21. C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (New York: Vintage, 1963), 24, 116, 139. James thought that what mattered for Toussaint was that the “cascade” of citizenship did not happen by itself; it had to be forced through violence, and what these radicals insisted on was mainly their right to be masters of their fate; the same was to be true in twentieth-century history.
22. Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, trans. Joan Pinkham (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972), 15.
23. Gary Wilder, The French Imperial Nation-State: Negritude and Colonial Humanism between the World Wars (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); see also Wilder, “Untimely Vision: Aimé Césaire, Decolonization, Utopia,” Public Culture 21, no. 1 (Winter 2009): 101–40.
24. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, preface Jean-Paul Sartre, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Press, 1963), 317.
25. W. E. B. Du Bois, “750,000,000 Clamoring for Human Rights,” New York Post, May 9, 1945, rpt. in Writings by W.E.B. Du Bois in Periodicals Edited by Others, 4 vols., ed. Herbert Aptheker (Millwood, NY: Kraus-Thompson, 1982), vol. 4, 2–3. See also Du Bois, “The Colonies at San Francisco,” Trek [Johannesburg], April 5, 1946, rpt. in Writings by W.E.B. Du Bois, Aptheker, ed., vol. 4, 6–8.
26. For the figure, Harold Karan Jacobson, “The United Nations and Colonialism: A Tentative Appraisal,” International Organization 16, no. 1 (Winter 1962): 45.
27. For an excellent rendition, see Mark Mazower, No Enchanted Palace: Empire, War, and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), ch. 1.
28. The transition is well captured by the subtitles of Evan Luard’s two-volume early UN history, A History of the United Nations, 2 vols. (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1982, 1989), covering 1945–55 as “the years of Western domination” and then 1955–65 as “the age of decolonization.” Compare Jacobson, “The United Nations and Colonialism,” and David W. Wainhouse, Remnants of Empire: The United Nations and the End of Colonialism (New York: Harper & Row, 1964).
29. For some specific analyses of the percolation of self-determination in UN politics on which I have drawn, see Benjamin Rivlin, “Self-Determination and Colonial Areas,” International Conciliation 501 (January 1955): 193–71; Muhammad Aziz Shukri, The Concept of Self-Determination at the United Nations (Damascus: Al Jadidah Press, 1965); and Rupert Emerson, “Self-Determination,” American Journal of International Law 65, no. 3 (July 1971): 459–75. For larger effects on the organization, see D. N. Sharma, The Afro-Asian Group in the United Nations (Allahabad: Chaitanya Publishing, 1969); David A. Kay, “The Politics of Decolonization: The New Nations and the United Nations Political Process,” International Organization 21, no. 4 (Autumn 1967): 786–11; and Kay, The New Nations in the United Nations, 1960–1967 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970).
30. Cited in Kweku Ampiah, The Political and Moral Imperatives of the Bandung Conference: The Reactions of the US, UK, and Japan (Folkestone: Global Oriental, 2007), 147.
31. UN General Assembly, A/C.3/SR.292 (1950), 133.
32. UN General Assembly, UN GA Res. 421(V), December 4, 1950.
33. UN General Assembly A/C.3/SR.361 (1951), 84.
34. UN General Assembly, A/C.3/SR.362 (1951), 90.
35. UN General Assembly, A/C.3/SR.366 (1951), 115.
36. UN General Assembly, A/PV.375 (1952), 517–18.
37. UN GA Res. 545(VI), February 5, 1952. The resolution also called for the covenant to “stipulate that all States, including those having responsibility for the administration of Non-Self-Governing Territories, should promote the realization of that right,” which in effect, if unofficially, revised the Charter Chapter XI. Down into the 1970s, leading international lawyers could attack this retroactive change as an illegitimate revision of the Charter outside its own amendment procedures. See Leo Gross, “The Right of Self-Determination in International Law,” in New States in the Modern World, ed. Martin Kilson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975). For the continuing debate on self-determination and rights at the UN, see Roger Normand and Sarah Zaidi, Human Rights at the UN: The Political History of Universal Justice (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 212–24.
38. Clyde Eagleton, “Excesses of Self-Determination,” Foreign Affairs 31, no. 4 (July 1953): 604.
39. Louis Henkin, “The United Nations and Human Rights,” International Organization 19, no. 3 (Summer 1965): 513.
40. Vernon Van Dyke, Human Rights, the United States, and the World Community (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 77.
41. Kay, New Nations, 87; cf. Kay, “The Politics of Decolonization,” 802. See also many of the analyses in Hedley Bull and Adam Watson, eds., The Expansion of International Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), esp. Bull’s “The Revolt against the West” and R. J. Vincent’s “Racial Equality.”
42. Amilcar Cabral, “Anonymous Soldiers for the United Nations” (December 1962), in Revolution in Guinea: Selected Texts, trans. Richard Handyside (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1969), 50–51.
43. See UN GA Res. 1598(XV), April 15, 1961, passed with only Portugal voting no; and later 1663(XVI), November 28, 1961; 1881(XVIII), October 11, 1963; and 1978(XVIII), December 17, 1963. And, for comment, Ballinger, Moses E. Akpan, African Goals and Diplomatic Strategies in the United Nations (North Quincy, MA: Christopher Publishing House, 1976); and Audie Klotz, Norms in International Relations: The Struggle against Apartheid (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), esp. 44–55. In the same years, there were also resolutions on the long-simmering South West Africa dispute, and the shocking decision by the International Court of Justice that other African countries had no standing in the forum to bring an action. See, e.g., John Dugard, The South West Africa-Namibia Dispute (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), 220–31 and ch. 8.
44. UN GA Res. 1775(XVII), December 7, 1962.
45. UN GA Res. 1904(XVIII), November 20, 1963, 2106A(XX), December 21, 1965, and 2131(XX), December 21, 1965.
46. For some of this, esp. the Human Rights Commission’s Sub-commission on Prevention of Discrimination, see Jean-Bernard Marie, La Commission des droits de l’homme de l’ONU (Paris: A. Pedone, 1975); Moses Moskowitz, The Roots and Reaches of United Nations Actions and Decisions (Alphen aan den Rijn: Sijthoff & Nordhoff, 1980); and Howard Tolley, The United Nations Commission of Human Rights (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1987).
47. On the first topic, see Roland J. Burke, “‘The Compelling Dialogue of Freedom’: Human Rights and the Bandung Conference,” Human Rights Quarterly 28 (2006): 947–65. On the second topic, see Fabian Klose, Menschenrechte im Schatten kolonialer Gewalt: Die Dekolonisierungskriege in Kenia und Algerien 1945–1962 (Munich: Oldenbourg Verlag, 2009), written in the shadow of Matthew Connelly’s A Diplomatic Revolution: Algeria’s Fight for Independence and the Origins of the Post-Cold War Order (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). If my approach in this chapter is correct, neither topic should be pursued in isolation from the larger anticolonialist picture.
48. See, e.g., Faisal Devji’s fascinating attempt to read contemporary terrorism as Gandhian in The Terrorist in Search of Humanity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009).
49. David H. Bayley, Public Liberties in the New States (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1964), 142.
50. Rupert Emerson, “The Fate of Human Rights in the Third World,” World Politics 27, no. 2 (January 1975): 223.
51. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, “The Politics of Human Rights,” Commentary 64, no. 2 (August 1977): 22.