Sacred trusteeship and human rights? Civilisations, development and welfare

The aftermath of the First World War saw a sharp, if ultimately unsuccessful, challenge to the prevailing imperial order. Its principal source came not from human rights, but instead the collective doctrine of self-determination, famously declared by President Woodrow Wilson, and embraced by colonised peoples from Egypt to the Philippines.¹⁴ Wilson had promised self-determination, the right of peoples to determine their own destiny, a concept that seemed to imply the end of empire.

In his famous Fourteen Points, enunciated on 8 January 1918, Wilson asserted that on questions of sovereignty, ‘the interests of the populations concerned must have equal weight with the equitable claims of the government whose title is to be determined’.¹⁵ In practice, he meant no such thing. Wilsonian self-determination was applied cautiously in Europe, and virtually not at all outside it. With respect to individual human rights, the settlement at Paris was more equitable in its deficiency—it delivered nothing to Europeans or to colonial territories.¹⁶ Instead of inaugurating an age of global self-determination, there was a reconstituted basis for Western empires, one that codified, albeit weakly and partially, the duty of the colonising power towards its territories. It represented, in a way, the apotheosis of the imperial humanitarian impulse, transposed into the clumsy legal and administrative machinery of the League of Nations. Self-government was vaguely held out as the end-point, with precious little precision as to when this might be achieved. Any prospective dates were measured in near geologic time scales.

The most obvious innovation in the League’s approach to colonialism was the new status accorded to the colonies of the dissolved Ottoman Empire and the defeated Central Powers, principally Germany.¹⁷ No longer colonies, these territories were rechristened ‘mandates’, their care a ‘sacred trust of civilization’.¹⁸ Organised in a frank hierarchy of civilisational attainment, those in Class A, the former Ottoman territories in the Middle East, were regarded as quasi-autonomous.

The League recognised Iraq, Syria, Palestine and Jordan as all belonging to ‘a stage of development where their existence as independent nations can be provisionally recognized’.¹⁹ Their populations gained notional control over their own affairs, though restricted by the custodianship of the Mandatory Powers in the Middle East, France and Britain. Those in Class B (African territories, notably Tanganyika, Cameroon, Rwanda and Burundi), purportedly much less advanced, thus required more serious tutelage from their new European trustees. Territories in the South Pacific, Class C, were the most ‘backward’, and required near total control.

Nevertheless, this implied something rather more than just a change in the colour of the imperial flag. Mandatory powers, notably Britain, France and South Africa, were required to provide extensive information, and undertake quite thorough surveys of the various social, economic and political conditions in this specially privileged subset of internationally supervised colonies. Voices from the Mandate territories were for the first time granted an avenue of formal appeal to the world—transmitted in the countless petitions sent to the Mandates Commission, where they were heard in procedure, although rarely subject to serious debate. While the Mandates Commission was avowedly gradualist and conservative, it sought to regulate, however toothlessly, the conduct of empires against a small subset of their subjects. This certainly did not mean respect for the full myriad of rights enjoyed in the metropole, but it did require at least superficial gestures towards basic education, participation, economic and social development, and a general concern for the welfare of the people. There was even some explicit recognition of rights, for example, to religious observance.

Across the interwar period, modernising, welfarist imperialism was well aligned with the mentality of the League, an international organisation as much a forum for self-proclaimed progressive imperialists as for sovereign states.

Although not formally bound to accord its normal colonies the same protection as the Mandates, Britain tended to view standard colonial administration as basically consonant with the kind of government required for the Mandates, though this was less true of France.²⁰ The Mandates were the flagship examples of the League’s semi-reformed platform for colonialism, but the ideas of trusteeship and humane paternalist administration defined the era more generally—in rhetoric, if not always in substance.

On both imperial and anti-colonial nationalist sides, the notion of individual rights was largely in eclipse between 1919 and 1939. Even those nationalists who seized upon Wilson’s declaration tended not to emphasise the equality of all people, or speak of the rights of citizens, but instead invoked the just claims of specific peoples, nations, races and civilisations. In September 1919, for example, Egyptian nationalists rejoiced in the hope not of universal racial equality, but of improving their standing in the roll call of distinguished civilisations:

The Americans have come to realize that there are inhabitants in Egypt who are not barbarians or negroes or red-skinned, but are rather the heirs of an ancient civilization who are demanding to occupy their due place under the Sun.²¹

Racial hierarchy was far from repudiated, as various nationalists sought accommodation within the privileged Atlantic stratum. The approach evaded any fundamental clash with the philosophical basis of imperialism in the general case, and such a mindset essentially disengaged from precepts of universal human parity.

This collective and civilisational inflection was strikingly evident in the often mythologised attempt of the Japanese delegation to have racial equality written into the League of Nations Covenant. The basis for their arguments relied less on the universal equality of all individuals than on an assertion of the equality of particular civilisations—notably that of Japan with those of the West. It was, in essence, little more than an expression of Japan’s desire for peer recognition with the European states, rather than the kind of racial equality that saw all individuals as equals.

The sole major exception to this limited vision of racial equality were the less celebrated voices of African nationalism, led by the iconic W.E.B. Du Bois, who met at the First Pan-African Conference, held in February 1919 in Paris. Their programme of racial equality and democratic freedom was much closer to universal—but found no enthusiasm within the formal proceedings of Versailles or the League.²² For all its talk on the evils of racialism, Japan’s diplomatic corps carefully distanced itself from the then radical equality and political freedom proposed by Du Bois.²³ The transformative vision of the First Pan-African Conference was orphaned and ignored. Universalist claims against empire and race had no major patrons; the aspiring powers like Japan and China were fighting for a favourable place in an imperial, racialised order, and not for its dissolution.

Despite the hopes it excited, the post-war settlement of 1919, and the machinery it created, did little in terms of human rights for imperial territories. Gradualist programmes of partial self-government, and economic and social development continued their trajec- tory—lethargically in South Asia, slower still elsewhere—but with no major rupture in the legitimacy of the imperial project, now becoming dressed in the language of modernisation, progress and civilisation. All of these schemes claimed to advance human welfare in the colonies, but eschewed the equality, autonomy and personal freedom inherent in the notion of universal human rights. Self-determination would have its real moment in the Second World War, proclaimed in the 1941 Atlantic Charter, a document seized upon by nationalists, much in the same way as Wilson’s words had been a generation earlier. This time, despite the best efforts of Britain’s Prime Minister Winston Churchill to cauterise the self-determination principle to Nazi-occupied Europe, the idea was not so easily attenuated. The post-war settlement of 1945 tilted much further towards the promotion of self-government and even full decolonisation.

For the first time, it also coupled this idea to a recognisably modern notion of human rights, where individuals, along with collectivities, would be afforded equality and liberty.

The global disruption of the Second World War, which grossly disordered existing ideological, economic and political relationships, shook the foundations of empire. Allied defeats at the hands of Japan exploded the myth of Western military supremacy. Aside from the ruined economies and sheer exhaustion of the Western colonial powers, those ideas of national freedom and individual rights, loudly proclaimed in the Allied struggle, lent a new source of legitimacy to anti-colonial movements. Declarations for self- determination—that is, the right for peoples to determine their political destiny—alongside promises of racial equality, democracy and expansive measures of social welfare, were all part of the Allied lexicon.²⁴ All proved hard to reconcile with the imperial status quo, even in its ‘progressive’ interwar configuration. Against this rising tide, the birth of human rights and the dissolution of empire seemed almost pre-ordained. Certainly some of the more astute British colonial officials thought so, privately pleading to the Colonial Office that the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights not be promoted in their colonies. In late 1949, the governors of seven African territories warned that the Declaration should not be circulated. Their reasoning was clear: ‘We can hardly expect to win the confidence of Africans by making statements of “ultimate ideals” while in practice we take steps in precisely the opposite direction.’²⁵ It was a telling observation on the nature of British administration.

Yet in the immediate post-war moment, there remained the prospect that empire might become not the enemy, but the facilitator, of human rights. When assessed in retrospect, this proposition was of vanishingly limited plausibility, but in the fleeting, optimistic era of reformist colonialism, both French and British authorities conceived a world where colonialism would co-exist with some pared-back notion of human rights.

France’s 1944 Brazzaville Declaration signalled a French Empire with greater citizenship rights and political representation, but with no promise of national independence, and no certainty of full equality.²⁶ South African Field-Marshal Jan Smuts, an avowed exponent of liberal empire, co-authored the 1945 preamble to the United Nations Charter, including its prominent references to human rights. The cleavage between how Smuts viewed what was entailed by this phrase, and how, for example, the African National Congress (ANC) viewed rights, was striking. One saw imperial trusteeship and paternalist welfare for Africans; the other saw equal citizenship in all its freedoms.²⁷ Yet the near infinite elastic reserve of the human rights category allowed Smuts, and other proponents of racial hierarchy and imperialism, to assume that the new world of rights could retain a place for empire. Western diplomats and colonial officials, confronted with insistent and escalating nationalist demands, were markedly less convinced in private. At the UN, and in the colonies, these figures spent much of the 1950s on the defensive—attempting to craft a precarious modus vivendi between the promise of new universal human rights and the realities of empire. The effort never worked well, and did not work for long. Only a few years after Smuts had circulated his draft charter, the United Nations had become the epicentre for debates about the legitimacy of empire, with the language of human rights providing much of the armamentarium wielded by the emerging anti-colonial movement.

<< | >>

↑

Source: Aldrich Robert, McKenzie Kirsten (eds.). The Routledge History of Western Empires. Routledge,2014. — 542 p.. 2014

Sacred trusteeship and human rights? Civilisations, development and welfare

More on the topic Sacred trusteeship and human rights? Civilisations, development and welfare: