The right to self-determination: colonialism recast as a human rights violation, 1950—1960
With the passage of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted during a momentous night session of the United Nations General Assembly on 10 December 1948, the concept of universality had received a powerful symbolic endorsement.
The Declaration promised ‘a common standard of achievement for all peoples, and all nations’, and enumerated a set of rights that applied not only to sovereign states, but also ‘among the peoples of territories under their jurisdiction’, that is, the colonies.28 Mohammad Hatta, the first vice-president of Indonesia, recalled its impact vividly. In a 1956 reflection on Indonesia’s post-independence politics, he identified the Declaration’s power for the nationalists, who were then engaged in the battle against the Dutch:When Indonesian leaders, who in their younger days had been fighting pioneers, heard the declaration in Article I ‘that all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights,’ it was as if they heard themselves speaking. It gave them the feeling that people wanted to realize their own long-held ideals in international society.29
The magnitude of this catastrophe for the legitimacy of empire was not immediately apparent, most obviously because the text had no legal implications, merely moral ones. Publicly, it was embraced by the Western powers. French representative Rene Cassin, a future Nobel Laureate for his work on the Declaration, was among the most influential of its architects. Nevertheless, the philosophy encapsulated in the Declaration—that of equal rights for all everywhere, and the myriad freedoms contained in its specific articles—would rapidly become part of the arsenal wielded against the Western powers. Cassin soon found himself defending the conduct of the French Empire against the principles he did so much to promote.30
Less than two years after the passage of the Universal Declaration, the very existence of empire was being cast as inherently incompatible with the precepts of human rights.
Older ideas about eliminating abuses of the system, of reforming, of incremental liberalisation, were all undercut by this maximalist critique. Across October and November 1950, as the General Assembly debated the successor to the Universal Declaration—a legally binding treaty, the Covenant on Human Rights—the principle of universality came directly into conflict with inherently discriminatory foundations of empire.31 The immediate precipitating factor was an initiative from the Western imperial powers, France, Britain and Belgium, to include a special clause excluding their colonies from automatically receiving the Covenant’s proposed human rights.32 The colonial clause represented a frank denial of the idea of universal human rights, or, at best, an exhortation that their implementation be deferred for a very considerable period while imperial education of colonial subjects continued.The arguments put forward in favour of this clause revolved around the different levels of development and ‘civilisation’ across the colonial world. Belgium’s representative gave the most forthright defence of discriminating between colonies and metropolitan territory. The Covenant, he argued, mandated ‘rules of conduct which, as they supposed a high degree of civilization, were often incompatible with the ideas of peoples who had not yet reached a high degree of development’.33 In phrasing richly reminiscent of the classic imperial trusteeship idea, he warned that the colonies ‘should only be led towards civilization in a progressive manner which was adapted to their varying degrees of development and to the special conditions of each country’.34 Immediate application of all human rights was simply out of the question. While somewhat more circumspect, Cassin too was a prominent defender of differentiating colonial human rights from those enjoyed in the metropole, a position which sat uneasily with his advocacy of the Universal Declaration.
Cassin was certainly willing to accept that many human rights could be universally applied, but others would require further development. Full-scale universality of rights, ‘might subject countries inhabited by different peoples to uniform obligations’. This would be unwise, because metropolitan countries would then be bound only to those rights ‘applicable to peoples still in the lowest stage of development’, that is to say, those which could be realised in places like Africa.35Such claims met an immediate and furious response from the small but growing band of Asian, Arab and Latin American delegations, who ardently championed a universality of rights. Iraqi, Indian, Chinese, Egyptian, Indonesian and Chilean representatives led the charge against the colonial clause, and the compromise with imperial rule it implied. Badia Afnan (Iraq) promptly identified the contradiction within Cassin’s universalist pretensions and his defence of the clause. She pondered ‘how the degree of evolution of a people could prevent it from enjoying the rights which that representative had admitted to be inherent in human nature’.36 Chile’s Carlos Valenzuela lamented that the colonial clause presupposed the existence of ‘a second category of people in the world... called natives... regarded as unfit to enjoy the minimum rights which the covenant was to guarantee’.37 The clause was overwhelmingly defeated, and another clause explicitly requiring equal treatment of colonies was put in its place.38 This represented a turning point, where the imperial idea of slowly continuing the civilising mission, with a partial and questionable veneer of human rights implementation in the near term, was soundly bypassed by a strident chorus of states in favour of universal human rights.
Worse was to come for the imperial strategy, with the introduction of proposals for ‘a right to self-determination’ in the human rights covenant in November 1950.
While debates about the status of human rights and empire with respect to specific freedoms, with careful legal phrasing and noble promises, might perhaps be massaged to acceptability, the right to self-determination allowed no such evasions. It proposed that self-determination, the collective will of the people to determine their status and government, served as the cornerstone of all human rights.39 In the shorthand usually adopted, empire would have to end for individual human rights to be realised. The Syrian delegate, Nizar Kayali, a doctoral graduate from Columbia University, encapsulated the notion best: self-determination ‘was the essential prerequisite of all other rights’.40 National liberation enabled individual freedom. Thus, although the campaign for the right to self-determination has often been dismissed as little more than an instrument for furthering independence and sovereignty, for a period across the 1940s through to the beginning of the 1960s, it became deeply bound up with the question of individual human rights.For many, though certainly not all, within this generation of nationalist leaders and activists, self-determination and individual freedom were practically inseparable. Julius Nyerere, leader of the Tanganyikan nationalist movement, and later Tanzanian president, was perhaps the most explicit. In his inaugural address to the new parliament, on 10 December 1962, Nyerere located human rights as the centrepiece of the national mission:
What is the basic principle on which our young country is founded? At the time when we were still demanding our right to freedom we made this absolutely clear. The principle on which we stood, and on which we stand today, is the principle of human rights. It is the dignity and well-being of all our people which is the beginning and the end of all our efforts. For the freedom we demanded was not mere independence from colonialism; what we sought was personal freedom for all the people of Tanganyika, freedom for every individual.41
Indonesian nationalist Sutan Sjahrir was emphatic that the revolution against the Dutch was about freedom.
Indonesians, he said, ‘must never for a moment forget that we are creating a democratic revolution... top priority must be given, not to nationalism, but to democracy’. Sjahrir cited the parallels between European fascism and Dutch rule, and insisted that in the ‘struggle for nationhood, our people are demanding their basic human rights’, as an assurance against any future repression.42In short, anti-colonialists in the post-war decade were generally enthused about both self-determination and human rights. At the Asian-African Conference, held in Bandung in April 1955, there were both vehement denunciations of imperialism, and the recognition of the Universal Declaration as ‘a common standard of achievement’.43 Similar endorsements emerged at regional conferences in Mwanza (1958) and Lagos (1961).
Even the League for International Human Rights, whose French incarnation had been so timid in its critique of empire in the 1930s, had started to drift to a hard-line position on the need for independence. As late as 1946, the League remained ambivalent about the compatibility of empire and human rights. According to the organisation’s policy paper, it was ‘not the function of the League to advocate the abolition of the imperialist colonial system but to champion the widest possible exercise of rights under it’.44 Self-determination might be required for the full enjoyment of human rights, but not necessarily. By the mid-1950s, this had hardened into a much more straightforward opposition to imperialism, a shift no doubt expedited by the shocking catalogue of imperial atrocities across Indochina, East Africa and North Africa. In May 1956, Roger Baldwin, chief of the League, clarified its position, one that supported self-government and self-determination, ‘in principle, and in practice’.45
The nexus between human rights and the right to self-determination in the 1950s and early 1960s was undeniable, but its meaning remained ambiguous.
It was never entirely certain to what extent the ultimate ends were independence and sovereignty or individual human rights. Was self-determination the means to universal human rights, or was the rhetoric of human rights merely a useful weapon against colonialism? For a movement as geographically diverse and temporally dispersed as anti-colonialism, no general case answer emerges. Yet it is clear that by the late 1960s, the promise of human rights had been largely betrayed, as the initial wave of post-colonial regimes devolved into authoritarianism and outright dictatorship. Self-determination, the collective freedom from alien rule, was cleaved from human rights—a process completed in the 1970 Declaration on Friendly Relations.46 During the drafting of that text, the Burmese representative, from the military junta, openly rejected any relationship between national freedom and individual human rights. It was, instead, ‘relevant only to colonialism and was specifically applied in the promotion of independence of peoples under colonial domination’.47 Anti-colonialism was retrospectively redefined as about the nation, not the individuals within it.