Читать книгу The Colonialism of Human Rights - Colin Samson - Страница 12

Often with little explicit reference to these social contexts, contemporary iterations of human rights such as the UDHR are those relating to liberty, nationality, privacy, property, religion, social security, education, culture, and freedom from slavery, torture and arbitrary detention. The ultimate guarantor of these rights is the state, which in the UN framework is assumed to be amenable to international moral pressure to enact liberal principles. Thus, human rights are most consistent with democratic political orders in which the state is seen to be a product of popular consent and, in turn, guarantees the rights of those that are its subjects. Indeed, advocates for rights of one type or another often frame them as a principle of nation-state democracy.

For example, the rights that Martin Luther King and members of the civil rights movement advocated were workers’ rights, fair employment, decent housing, guaranteed incomes and political participation. King’s dedication to the fusion of racial and economic justice was underlined by his support for striking sanitation workers in Memphis, the city where, tragically, he was assassinated. His advocacy was not just civil rights for African-Americans but human rights, and they were influenced by understandings of rights declarations that made no reference to racial specificity.³¹ The problem the movement addressed was that the state was not regulating the various spheres of civil society in order to allow for the realization of democratic rights. Thus, for King, ‘it is not a constitutional right that men have jobs, but it is a human right’.³² While he may have sensed that human rights were highly contingent, and that they favoured whites and those with property and money, King understandably pleaded for the universal human rights that the American government explicated in its Constitution, jurisprudence and laws. King was simply holding the US government to abide by its own stated liberal principles.

However, the fraught coexistence of assertions of universal human rights with variably applied civic and citizenship rights, which King contested, has endured within the Western history of ideas, as well as in policies and laws. As far back as Athenian democracy, complex laws applied to slaves and citizens differently, but their administration and rule were interlocking.³³ Among the Romans, exemplified in the famous tablets of the Gortyn codes of the Roman Odeion of first-century Crete, laws were inscribed to apply differentially to separate categories of people – men and women, free people and slaves – and punishments for different configurations of transgression depended on the circumstances, and the status of both victims and perpetrators. Amendments were made that coincided with changing social patterns, and these can be interpreted from various inscriptions on the slabs.³⁴ Hence, as Hanchard shows, democracies of the past relied on legal regimes of exclusion, and these are relevant to the consideration of contemporary democracies. The difference is, however, that contemporary democracies explicitly assert equality,³⁵ while tolerating and often abetting the ongoing effects of exclusionary mechanisms.

Colonizing and enslaving shaped these exclusions since they were underpinned by ideologies emphasizing cultural hierarchy. This was expressed in the use of the trope ‘civilization’, which connoted an opposition to be overcome in the barbaric or savage. For Immanuel Kant, if a territory lacks ‘rudimentary modern legal and commercial institutions and a centralized coercive authority’, it is a threat to civilized states, which have a right to impose order upon the peoples of the territory to set them on the path of modernization.³⁶ That may mean, as it often did under colonialism, not permitting such peoples equivalent rights to those who considered themselves civilized. Within this foundational liberal ideology, the human rights of non-European peoples under European dominion were often constituted as rights to be ‘modernized’, and therefore these peoples were denied some of the liberal ‘universal’ rights articulated by Enlightenment philosophers. The British Empire, for example, incorporated Asian, African and indigenous American peoples into its political and legal order with complex differentiations of rights according to caste, religion and tribe.³⁷

Britain’s enslaved Africans in the Caribbean and elsewhere, of course, had no such citizenship rights, and the terms of the abolition of slavery dramatically illustrated how rights and privileges were mapped onto ways of thinking about human beings through hierarchy. Despite abolitionist voices, Britain did its utmost to preserve slavery. It was ‘the settled policy of England to encourage the slave trade’.³⁸ The British Parliament intervened to prevent attempts to prohibit slavery or limit the importing of enslaved people in its North American and Caribbean colonies in the eighteenth century.³⁹ After Britain eventually abolished slavery in its colonies, in 1834 a sum of £20 million, equal to anywhere between £2.57 billion and £76 billion in 2010,⁴⁰ was set aside to compensate proprietors of enslaved people through a loan from the City of London that was only paid off in 2015. At the time, there was ‘a feeding frenzy amongst members of the British elite over the compensation money, a frenzy which drew thousands of Britons into asserting their ownership of slaves once the state attached specific and immediate monetary value to the claims of ownership’.⁴¹

By contrast, as Nicholas Draper shows in his analysis of documents relating to the Compensation Commission set up to disburse the monies,⁴² neither reparation nor human agency was attached to those enslaved by the British on their Caribbean plantations. Under the Act abolishing slavery, freed people were required to work as unpaid labourers or ‘apprentices’ for four to six years.⁴³ The compensation to slave holders and investors in slavery has helped perpetuate privilege and luxury in Britain and elsewhere for the generations of descendants of British enslavers. Including widows, clergymen and many shareholders with financial, trading and other relationships with slavery, those who were compensated for the loss of their property have continued to use this and other monies from slavery to amass wealth, power and advantage. The same is true for various institutions in British society documented by the Legacies of British Slave Ownership project at University College London.⁴⁴ Hence, current social and racial hierarchies in Britain are tangibly related to slavery and to the British government’s massive rewards to owners of human property.

As this illustrates, hierarchical access to social, political and economic rights was deeply ingrained in British political culture. Similar hierarchies were embedded in the premises of nineteenth-century British thinkers, especially the Utilitarians, whose thought is another important source of liberalism. While advocating constitutional representative government, equality under the law, and freedom of thought, speech and conscience – with only the prominent exception of Jeremy Bentham – they simultaneously provided important sources of guidance for British colonial administration, especially of India. Their support for colonialism meant that these thinkers had to make and justify exceptions to liberal principles. The justifications sprang from the a priori position that Europeans in general were superior peoples, and, by the same token, non-Europeans possessed an inferiority often characterized as uncivilized or barbaric. Following the observations of colonial administrators, prominently including the jurist and historian Sir Henry Maine,⁴⁵ the idea that non-Europeans were fixed in a prior state of human development became part of the guiding assumptions of liberalism.

Stokes opens his history of Utilitarian thought on India by observing that ‘the physical and mental distance separating East and West was to be annihilated by the discoveries of science, by commercial intercourse, and by transplanting the genius of English laws and English education’.⁴⁶ To achieve this, James Mill, and his son John Stuart Mill – who spent thirty-five years as a British East India Company official – believed that authoritarian rule would be needed to transform Indians culturally if liberal democracy were to be successful. In 1859 in his introduction to ‘On Liberty’, John Stuart Mill proclaimed:

To characterize any conduct whatever towards a barbarous people as a violation of the law of nations only shows that he who speaks has never considered the subject … Barbarians have no rights as a nation except a right to such treatments as may, at the earliest possible period, fit them for becoming one. Despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians, provided the end be their improvement, and the means justified by actually effecting that end.⁴⁷

Although most of his writings were meant to apply to Britain, Mill did not think Indians were sufficiently advanced to have liberal democracy extended to them. Because suffrage should not be offered to those who are not ‘in the normal condition of a human being’⁴⁸ – meaning illiterate and poor people in Britain – it certainly could not be granted to Indians on account of Mill’s conviction of their backwardness. Although the British introduced some elements of representative government in India, both Mills opposed it. James Mill’s energies were fashioned towards ‘a revolution in Indian society carried out solely by the weapon of law’.⁴⁹ Much of this was geared towards destroying collective ownership of property, which he regarded as primitive, and introducing individualistic private property relationships. Assuming a Hobbesian version of human nature as egoistic and violent, Mill believed that the individual must be at the centre of all policy, not the collectivity – and certainly not the cultures of those under colonial rule.

France, like Britain, was a colonial power as well as a slave-holding and slave-trading nation. It also necessarily conferred rights differentially. Despite the Republican universality of the French Revolution, exclusions and rightlessness were present in French slave trading, slave owning and the running of Caribbean plantation colonies, with complex gradations of privileges based on racial phenotypes. The Revolution made no decisive break with slavery, and in its zigzag aftermath the state stipulated other categories of inferior rights for women, religious minorities and those without property. In part because of the stark contradiction between the ‘Rights of Man’ and enslavement, the highly profitable wealth-creating slave trade became a taboo subject which the post-Revolution Constituent and Legislative Assemblies avoided. In the Constituent Assembly, 150 ‘colonial proprietors’ sat as National Deputies. They looked after slave-plantation interests, and this included twice preventing ‘mulattoes’ from admission as Deputies in a ‘storm of protest’ so vigorous that the reporter’s voice could not be heard.⁵⁰ An early post-Revolutionary decree made it a crime to incite unrest in the colonies.⁵¹ Although slave emancipation occurred in 1794 after the Revolution, under pressure from the Société des Amis des Noirs and passionate politicians and intellectuals, it was not meaningfully implemented, and the French slave trade itself reached its peak between 1789 and 1791, with eighty-three slave ships sailing from Nantes and Bordeaux alone in 1790. That same year, over 40,000 Africans were sold in Saint-Domingue, several thousand more than in the pre-Revolutionary era.⁵² After seizing power in 1799, Napoleon Bonaparte reinstated slavery in 1802 and denied any political rights to free blacks in the colonies and France.⁵³ It was therefore the resistance of enslaved people in Saint-Domingue led by Toussaint L’Ouverture that pushed Republican universalist France towards a grudging recognition of ‘universal’ human rights, rather than liberal French anti-slavery sentiment, as writers such as Aimé Césaire and C. L. R. James have argued.⁵⁴

French enslavement of Africans coexisted with more formal colonialism. Alexis de Tocqueville gave much thought to French colonization in Algeria. His preoccupations were somewhat different from those of John Stuart Mill since he was dealing with a settler colony, and Mill in India was not. When in his 1841 ‘Essay on Algeria’ he turns to looking at rights, he is far more concerned with the rights of the colonists than the colonized, and advocates making life for the former as close as possible to what it would be in France. However, ‘our great political institutions’ – which Tocqueville lists as elections, freedom of the press and trial by jury – ‘are not necessary for the infancy of societies’.⁵⁵ He further contends that political liberties need to be suspended due to the necessity of militarily protecting the outnumbered French colonists, whom he believed needed to have their rights to colonize and appropriate land strengthened. He says little about Muslim Algerians rights to their property, and assumes that they will only benefit from French colonization as long as it is carried out thoughtfully. But, in 1848, Louis Napoleon came to power through a coup d’état, and then curtailed democratic rights, jailed opponents, set up penal colonies and declared himself Emperor for life. His twenty-year rule coincided with several foreign conquests, including Syria, Indo-China, and the establishing of Maximillian in Mexico, where liberal Republican rights were denied to local populations.