Conclusions: a world made new? Human rights after empire

The 1948 Universal Declaration, the foundation of the modern human rights idea and the lodestar for post-war human rights activism, outlined a set of norms that stood in severe tension with empire as it had existed.

Its assertion of full racial equality and a common standard of rights for all directly contradicted the ideological pillars of even the most optimistic version of Western imperialism, that of a humane, paternalist civilising enterprise. In less abstract terms, the Declaration’s provisions stood in stark contrast to the practice of government and administration in colonial territories. Civil and political rights of assembly, association, expression, popular participation and legal due process—all enumerated in the 1948 text—were all constrained, sometimes gravely so, across Asia, Africa and Oceania. Economic and social rights to health, housing and education, while theoretically compatible with imperialism’s promises of modernisation and development, remained severely limited. In the 1940s and 1950s, Britain and France were constructing full-blown social democratic welfare states in their metropolitan territory, but never even remotely approached such schemes in their colonies. There was no National Health Service for Kenya, while campaigns for equality in the sphere of economic and social rights, notably in French Africa, were generally without success, their failure demonstrating much about the nature of imperialist economics.⁴⁸ Unlike the earlier, related concept of humanitarianism, which could find an accommodative place in Western imperial thought, the vision of 1948 never did. There was simply too much dissonance between the ideas and practice of empire and the definitive features of universal human rights for a convincing, robust synthesis. In their most liberal formulations, Western empires did promise symmetrical citizenship and equality of all rights—but always in the future, often the distant future.

While humanitarianism permitted some asymmetry between peoples, universal human rights could not do so without losing their meaning.

The contest between human rights and empire, strongest in the 1950s, sharpens the meaning of both terms, and their respective paradoxes. The liberal pretences of the French, British and, to a lesser extent, Dutch empires suggested that empire might be an efficient vector for transmitting those civil and political rights which held their origins in ‘Western’ civilisation. But the ground truth of imperial rule so frequently departed from these ideals that they were learnt much more in the breach than the observance. Like human rights, liberal empire was also universalistic in its ambitions. Yet only rarely was it so in its practices—a tendency especially true of the highly contingent systems of indirect rule pursued by Britain in Africa and Oceania. Many of the declared aims of imperial rule—social and economic development, modernisation and humanity—were superficially amenable to important human rights. Yet they came from a markedly different impulse, collective enterprises bestowed (or, more accurately, imposed) on people without much consent and still less mass engagement. Mass tropical hygiene campaigns, a signature practice of colonial humanitarianism, were philosophically very different from the right to healthcare, not least in their coercive dimensions. Colonial rule might incidentally improve a few human rights in the economic and social sphere, but whatever slender progress it made was never animated by the equality, individuality and autonomy that became the hallmarks of the modern human rights idea. From time to time, imperial administrations delivered somewhat progressive rights outcomes, but for reasons essentially indifferent to human rights.

Conversely, contemporary definitions of human rights were crystallised by the battle with imperialism, though with problematic results. From the early 1950s onwards, there was an emphatic push to incorporate a collective aspect to human rights, to couple national freedom with individual freedom.

Human rights could only be respected when the people determined their own future, which was usually taken to mean a future as an independent sovereign state. Through the activism of the growing band of Asian, African and Arab states, anti-colonialism became a bedrock principle of international human rights law. Self-determination constitutes the first article in both the International Covenant on

Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), both adopted by the General Assembly in 1966, which remain the two most authoritative statements on human rights. Sovereignty was cast as the necessary gateway to freedom. Given the context of the 1950s and early 1960s, when serious imperial repression was rampant in Southeast Asia and throughout Africa and parts of the Caribbean, this represented a plausible assumption. France’s wars in Indochina and Algeria, Britain’s state of emergency in Kenya and Portugal’s unwavering authoritarianism in Angola and Mozambique provided ample demonstration that empires abused human rights.⁴⁹ However, post-colonial governance soon showed that sovereignty could be the portal not to freedom, but to indigenous repression. Self-determination was necessary for the realisation of human rights, but not sufficient. A world of sovereign states, largely realised by 1975, had seemingly done little more than repartition human rights abuses across a wider number of sovereign polities. It would take a new freedom movement emerging in the 1980s, one much less concerned with sovereignty, to revitalise the promise of the Universal Declaration. Led by national civil society groups, and non-government organisations, and a rapidly proliferating network of transnational human rights advocacy, it would fall to this generation to start to deliver sovereignty with individual freedom, rather than the mere absence of empire.

Notes

1 For a precis of the debate, see Jan Eckel, ‘Human Rights and Decolonization: New Perspectives and Open Questions’, Humanity, Vol.

1, No. 1 (Fall 2010), pp. 111-135.

2 Paul Gordon Lauren, The Evolution of International Human Rights: Visions Seen (Philadelphia, 2003), pp. 250-253.

3 Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia:Human Rights in History (Cambridge, MA, 2010), pp. 84, 87, 88, 98; Reza Afshari, ‘On the Historiography of Human Rights Reflections on Paul Gordon Lauren’s The Evolution of International Human Rights: Visions Seen’, Human Rights Quarterly, Vol. 29, No. 1 (February 2007), p. 50; A.W.B. Simpson, Human Rights and the End of Empire (Oxford, 2001), pp. 300-301.

4 See, for instance, recent work from Meredith Terretta, on the place of human rights in the fight against empire, ‘ “We Had Been Fooled into Thinking that the UN Watches over the Entire World”: Human Rights, UN Trust Territories, and Africa’s Decolonization’, Human Rights Quarterly, Vol. 34, No. 2 (May 2012), pp. 329-360; and ‘From Below and to the Left? Human Rights and Liberation Politics in Africa’s Postcolonial Age’, Journal of World History, Vol. 24, No. 2 (June 2013).

5 The link between the national and the individual aspects of freedom was a classic liberal tenet. See, for instance, Leonard Hobhouse, Liberalism (London, 1911).

6 For a detailed analysis of the paradoxes within the APS, see James Heartfield, The Aborigines' Protection Society: Humanitarian Imperialism in Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, Canada, South Africa, and the Congo, 1836-1909 (London, 2011). See also, Kenneth Nworah, ‘The Aborigines’ Protection Society, 1889-1909: A Pressure-Group in Colonial Policy', Canadian Journal of African Studies, Vol. 5, No. 1 (1971), pp. 79-91.

7 William Irvine, Between Justice and Politics: The Ligue des Droits de l'Homme, 1898-1945 (Stanford, 2007), p. 144; see also Emmanuelle Saada, Empire's Children: Race, Filiation and Citizenship in the French Colonies (Chicago, 2012), pp. 167, 230-232.

8 Bernard Porter, Critics of Empire:British Radical Attitudes to Colonialism in Africa 1895-1914 (London, 1968), p. 241. See also Kenneth Nworah, ‘The Liverpool “Sect” and British West African Policy 1895-1915’, African Affairs, Vol.

70, No. 281 (October 1971), pp. 349-364.

9 For a powerful case study of British humanitarian imperialism, see Catherine Hall's analysis of the 1840 World Anti-Slavery Convention, ‘Lords of Humankind Re-visited’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, Vol. 66, No. 3 (2003), pp. 472-485.

In rare instances, like that of Roger Casement, imperial humanitarianism would evolve into fullblown anti-imperialism, a transformation at least in part driven by bearing witness to the nature of imperial rule in Africa, and interlaced with his Irish nationalist identification.

Porter, Critics of Empire, p. 262.

By contrast, Adam Hochschild approaches the Congo Reform campaign as essentially an early human rights movement. See King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa (Boston, 1998); see also William Roger Louis, ‘Roger Casement and the Congo', The Journal of African History, Vol. 5, No. 1 (1964), pp. 99-120.

See also Michael Barnett's assessment of this imperial humanitarianism, Empire of Humanity: A History of Humanitarianism (Ithaca, 2011), p. 75.

This process is surveyed in outstanding detail by Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: SelfDetermination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (New York, 2007).

Ibid, p. 40.

Despite the absence of the universalist, individual human rights vocabulary of the post-1945 era, the League's minority rights treaties were a significant development, and compared favourably in legal effect to the UN's initial forays on its individual rights protections. For a provocative account, see Mark Mazower, ‘The Strange Triumph of Human Rights, 1933-1950', The Historical Journal, Vol. 47, No. 2 (June 2004), pp. 379-398.

The legal framework for the mandates system was impressive. See the discussion in Antony Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 115-123.

See, generally, Quincy Wright, Mandates under the League of Nations (Chicago, 1930).

For the League's provisions on the Mandates, see Article 22, Covenant of the League of Nations, available at http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/leagcov.asp, accessed 10 December 2012. Article 22, League Covenant. Further detailed conditions for each territory, beyond the broad framework of article 22, were elaborated in particular mandate agreements.

Michael Callahan, ‘“Mandated Territories are not Colonies”: Britain, France, and Africa in the 1930s', in R.M. Douglas, Michael D. Callahan and Elizabeth Bishop (eds), Imperialism on Trial: International Oversight of Colonial Rule in Historical Perspective (Lanham, 2006), pp. 1-20. See also Michael Callahan, A Sacred Trust: The League of Nations and Africa, 1929-1946 (Oregon, 2004), pp. 16-30, 33-49.

Manela, The Wilsonian Moment, p. 153. For further detail on the League's mandate philosophy, see Susan Pedersen, ‘Did “Imperial Trusteeship” Have Anything to do with “Human Rights”?', Research Working Paper, 9, available at http://remarque.as.nyu.edu/docs/IO/23785/Pedersen. doc, accessed 12 October 2012.

Paul Gordon Lauren, Power and Prejudice: The Politics and Diplomacy of Racial Discrimination (Boulder,

1996), p. 84.

Naoko Shimazu, Japan, Race and Equality: The Racial Equality Proposal of 1919 (London, 1998), p. 114. Cf. Lauren, Power and Prejudice, p. 85.

The Allied programme, its provenance, evolution and effects are thoroughly surveyed in Elizabeth Borgwardt, A New Deal for the World: America's Vision for Human Rights (Cambridge, MA, 2005). Cf. Simpson, Human Rights and the End of Empire, pp. 184-189.

Simpson, Human Rights and the End of Empire, pp. 458-459.

For further assessment of the 1944 Brazzaville Declaration, see Martin Shipway, The Road to War: France and Vietnam, 1944-1947 (Providence, 1996), pp. 90-92; and Daniel Maul, Human Rights, Development and Decolonization: The International Labour Organization, 1940-1970 (London, 2012), p. 57. Saul Dubow, ‘Smuts, the United Nations and the Rhetoric of Race and Rights', Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 43, No. 1 (January 2008), pp. 45-74.

Preamble, The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 10 December 1948, GA Res. 217 A (III), available at http://daccess-ods.un.org/access.nsf/Get?Open&DS=A/RES/217(III)& Lang = E, accessed 8 November 2012. For detailed discussion of the Declaration's drafting history, see Johannes Morsink, The Universal Declaration of Human Rights: Origins, Drafting and Intent (Philadelphia,

2003) ; and Mary Ann Glendon, A World Made New: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (New York, 2001).

Mohammad Hatta, ‘Colonial Society and the Ideals of Social Democracy', in Herbert Feith and Lance Castles (eds), Indonesian Political Thinking, 1945-1965 (Ithaca, 1970), p. 35.

30 For an excellent precis of Cassin and his paradoxes, see Glenda Sluga, ‘Les Droits de l’Homme and the Universality of Human Rights, 1945-1966', in Stefan-Ludwig Hoffman (ed.), Human Rights in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, 2011), pp. 107-124.

31 Roland Burke, Decolonization and the Evolution of International Human Rights (Philadelphia, 2010), pp. 116-121.

32 These colonial clauses had caused similar, though less spectacular, conflict in the drafting of the 1950 European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). In that case, the notion of the clause was vigorously repudiated by the future Senegalese President, Leopold Senghor, who sought universal application of the rights in the ECHR to Europe's colonies. The clause, argued Senghor, ‘would transform the European Declaration of Human Rights into a Declaration of European Human Rights. This would be to deny the same rights to other men.' See Simpson, Human Rights and the End of Empire, p. 739. No such clause had been required in the Universal Declaration because it held no legal effect.

33 Summary Records of the Third Committee of the General Assembly, 292nd meeting, 25 October 1950, A/C. 3/SR. 292, para 5.

34 Ibid.

35 Summary Records of the Third Committee of the General Assembly, 294th meeting, 27 October 1950, A/C. 3/SR. 294, paras 37-38.

36 Summary Records of the Third Committee of the General Assembly, 296th meeting, 27 October 1950, A/C. 3/SR. 296, para 6.

37 Ibid., para 69.

38 Summary Records of the Third Committee of the General Assembly, 302nd meeting, 2 November 1950, A/C. 3/SR. 302. Thirty states voted against the original clause, compared with eleven for it, with eight abstentions.

39 This position would reach its highest expression in 1960, with the adoption of The Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples, 14 December 1960, GA Res. 1514 A (XV), available at www.un.org/en/decolonization/declaration.shtml, accessed 18 November 2012.

40 Summary Records of the Third Committee of the General Assembly, 311th meeting, 10 November 1950, A/AC.3/SR. 311, para 4.

41 Nyerere, Inaugural Address to Parliament, 10 December 1962, in Nyerere, Freedom and Unity (Oxford, 1967), p. 178.

42 Sutan Sjahrir and Benedict Anderson, Our Struggle (Ithaca, 1968), pp. 26, 28.

43 Roland Burke, ‘“The Compelling Dialogue of Freedom”: Human Rights at the 1955 Bandung Conference', Human Rights Quarterly, Vol. 28, No. 4 (November 2006), pp. 947-965.

44 ‘Memo on policy affecting the rights of man in colonial countries', c. June 1946, The International League for the Rights of Man Archives, New York Public Library.

45 Roger Baldwin, Letter to the Board, c. May 1956, ILRM Archives, NYpL.

46 Burke, Decolonization, pp. 56-58.

47 Summary Record of the Special Committee on the Principles of International Law Concerning Friendly Relations and Co-operation Among States, 68th meeting, 3 December 1967, Geneva, A/AC.125/SR. 68, pp. 8-9.

48 Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (Berkeley, 2005), pp. 156, 177, 216, 233.

49 For the systematic nature of these abuses in the Kenyan example, see David Anderson, Histories of the Hanged: Britain's Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire (London, 2005); and Caroline Elkins, Britain's Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya (London, 2005).

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