Decolonization and the Internationalization of Rights
After 1945 the new United Nations institutions resembled the League of Nations of the interwar era in many ways, and it appeared initially as if the liberal internationalism that still worked in an imperial framework and had been animated by the legal traditions of the British Empire would continue after the war.
46 South African President Jan Smuts, the representative of a Commonwealth state based on racial segregation, composed the preamble to the United Nations Charter in 1945. It is hardly surprising that a condemnation of racism was absent from this document. In contrast to the interwar period, however, representatives of the colonies were no longer willing to be put off. Smuts became the object of attacks within the new international arena in 1946, in particular from Nehru and other Indian politicians, who now demanded recognition of the rights of the Indian minority in South Africa.
This became something of a precedent for the aforementioned dilemma: to demand universal rights and nonetheless to respect sovereignty rights. Until the end of apartheid, South Africa remained a kind of pariah state within the international community, but was never subject to any direct military intervention. With the Cold War division into East and West and the wars of decolonization, human rights became a disputed domain in international politics in the 1950s. One of the many ironies of this process was the “boomerang effect” of the internationalization of human rights: The demise of French and British imperial power coincided with the internationalization of the greatest accomplishments of their political and democratic cultures, that is, human rights.
As Glenda Sluga’s contribution shows, questions of racial and sexual equality constituted the central focus for the human rights rhetoric of the postcolonial and communist states. 47 At the time, liberal-democratic, socialist, and postcolonial human rights norms competed in the international arena, and yet each claimed for itself moral universalism. Consequently the prevailing models for the history of human rights are hardly convincing. In 1949, at the height of the Labour government’s reform policies, British sociologist T. H. Marshall proposed as a model for the historical development of citizenship a succession of civil, then political, and then social rights, which Italian philosopher
Noberto Bobbio , for instance, subsequently adopted and applied to human rights. Karel Vasak, a legal expert from Czechoslovakia who had fled to France in 1968, developed a similar model containing three generations of rights: first civil and political rights, followed by social and cultural rights, and finally in the twentieth century solidarity rights, such as the right to peace, development, and a healthy environment. 48 These different rights claims did not in fact follow one another as subsequent generations, but rather competed historically. Women’s suffrage was adopted in the European democracies only after the Great War, in France not until 1944 and in Switzerland not until 1971. The right to work had already appeared in Article 21 of the Declaration of Human Rights in the French Constitution of 1793 and was thus not an invention of the nineteenth or twentieth century. The United States did sign the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (1966) in 1977 at the beginning of the Carter administration, but is one of the few countries in the world that has not ratified it even today, although during the Second World War social rights were a firm part of the Roosevelt administration’s postwar agenda. 49
As British international legal expert A. W. Brian Simpson has argued, the decline of the colonial empires after 1945 can hardly be explained without the moral and political pressure of human rights. This is particularly clear in the revolts and wars in the 1950s against Great Britain and France, both of which had been weakened by the Second World War; these two colonial powers participated in the establishment of a European human rights regime and yet were compelled at the same time to declare states of emergency in their own colonies, for instance, Kenya and Algeria , in order to suppress independence movements, as Fabian Klose makes clear in his contribution to this volume. 50The fact that Great Britain initially insisted on excluding the subjects of its colonies from the European Convention on Human Rights and that France did not ratify the convention (until 1974) could hardly still be justified in terms of “a civilizing mission.”
As a result of decolonization, the institutions that liberal internationalism had created in the mid-1940s were now “globalized.” The new independent states of Africa and Asia increasingly gained in influence; since the early 1960s the countries of the “Third World” constituted a majority in purely numerical terms within the institutions of the United Nations.
Cold War rivalries and the emergence of “Third World” sovereign states fostered a fundamental change in the constitution of international society, previously dominated by European colonial empires. Now postcolonial states could assert their own perspective on human rights within international organizations. In 1960 the post-colonial states (on the initiative of the Soviet Union and without votes from the West) were able to attain recognition of the right to national self-determination as Article 1 of the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples – and thereby as one of the UN Human Rights Norms. 51
At the first International Human Rights Conference of the United Nations in Teheran in 1968, twenty years after the Universal Declaration, the states of the “Third World” – many of them now autocratic dictatorships such as the regime of Reza Shah Pahlavi in Iran – formulated a rejection of individual rights and a (renewed) turn within the international community to social and collective rights. The socialist states and the new states of the postcolonial world frequently formed an anti-colonial bloc against the West within international organizations (UNO, UNESCO , ILO), although this invocation of human rights had no consequences for jurisprudence within their own societies. 52
As Andreas Eckert argues in this volume, African political leaders invoked human rights in the 1950s primarily to expose the hypocrisy of the West. For anti-colonialist intellectuals such as Julius Nyerere, Frantz Fanon, or Léopold Senghor, the language of nationalism and revolutionary violence was more significant than that of human rights.
Whenever it appeared that the invocation of human rights might threaten the sovereign rights of recently independent nation-states, the former were summarily rejected, as Daniel RogerMaul’s article here suggests. This, of course, was no different in the case of the superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union. Thus from the perspective of the postcolonial world, human rights have constituted both: a moral and political means of applying pressure upon the former colonial powers in the international arena, while at the same time representing a dangerous, modernized version of the nineteenth-century “standard of civilization” that further fostered the social and economic gap between the imperial metropolis and the periphery (or North and South, as it was termed by this time).
Human rights thus became a language of international politics, although still without significant consequences for national governance. International legal experts such as Paul Kahn have even argued that one reason for the rapid juridification of the world (in different regional and international human rights regimes) was the fact that this emerging global law proved unenforceable. Torture, for instance, became a common practice in the dictatorships of Latin America at precisely the same time it was officially prohibited by the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1966, in force since 1976). 53
46. See Saul Dubow, “Smuts, the United Nations and the Rhetoric of Race and Rights,” Journal of Contemporary History , 43 (2008), 45–74; Mark Mazower, No Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations (Princeton, 2009).
47. See also Sunil Amrith/Glenda Sluga, “New Histories of the United Nations,” Journal of World History , 19 (2008), 251–274. In the 1950s and 1960s it was primarily representatives of the postcolonial world who put women’s rights on the UN agenda. See Roland Burke, Decolonization and the Evolution of International Human Rights (Philadelphia, 2010), 121–129. 48. T. H. Marshall, “Citizenship and Social Class,” in Citizenship and Social Class and Other Essays (Cambridge, 1950), 1–85; Norberto Bobbio, “Human Rights Now and in the Future [1968],” in The Age of Rights (London, 1996); Karel Vasak, “Pour une Troisième Generation des Droits de l’homme,” in C. Swinarski (ed.), Essays on International Humanitarian Law and Red Cross Principles in Honour of Jean Pictet (The Hague, l984), 837–845.
49. Martin H. Geyer, “Social Rights and Citizenship during World War II,” in Manfred Berg and Martin H. Geyer (eds.), Two Cultures of Rights: Germany and the United States (Cambridge, 2002), 143–166.
50. See also Simpson, Human Rights; Kenneth Cmiel, “Human Rights, Freedom of Information, and the Origins of Third World Solidarity,” in Mark Bradley and Patrice Petro (eds.), Truth Claims: Representation and Human Rights (New Brunswick, N.J., 2002), 107–130; Mikael Rask Madsen, “France, the United Kingdom and the ‘Boomerang’ of the Internationalisation of Human Rights (1945–2000),” in Simon Halliday and Patrick Smith (eds.), Human Rights Brought Home. Socio-Legal Perspectives on Human Rights in the National Context (Oxford, 2004), 57–86; Charles O. H. Parkinson, Bills of Rights and Decolonization: The Emergence of Domestic Human Rights Instruments in Britain’s Overseas Territories (Oxford, 2007); Bonny Ibhawoh, Imperialism and Human Rights: Colonial Discourses of Rights and Liberties in African History (New York, 2007); Burke , Decolonization .
51. See Burke , Decolonization , ch. 4.
52. See, for example, the ILO debates on forced labor between 1947 and 1960: Sandrine Kott, “Arbeit – ein transnationales Objekt? Die Frage der Zwangsarbeit im ‘Jahrzehnt der Menschenrechte,’” in Christina Benninghaus et al. (eds.), Unterwegs in Europa. Beiträge zu einer vergleichenden Sozial- und Kulturgeschichte (Frankfurt, 2008), 301–321; Daniel Roger Maul, Menschenrechte, Sozialpolitik und Dekolonisation. Die Internationale Arbeitsorganisation (IAO) 1940–1970 (Essen, 2007).
53. Paul W. Kahn, Sacred Violence: Torture, Terror, and Sovereignty (Ann Arbor, Mich., 2008), 57–58.
