Human Rights and Empire

Abstract

The collapse of the Western empires and the rise of human rights constitute two of the most transformative developments of the twentieth century. Their courses ran across each other, the trajectory of empire’s decline and the arc of human rights’ ascent were coincident, both catalysed by the political shifts of the immediate post-war period. Sheer temporal proximity and context ensured that these two epochal transitions intersected, often explosively. The dissolution of empire was, at least in part, animated by the language and ideas of human rights-principles ardently proclaimed by many anti-colonial nationalists. Equally, the terminal era of imperial governance had begun to engage with human rights, attempting to accommodate the new lexicon into various reformist programmes to secure colonial rule on more defensible foundations. No meaningful accommodation eventuated-there was no empire of human rights, and a plausible means for one was never articulated. Nevertheless, the relationship between empire and human rights is more complex than the collapse of the former and the resultant triumph of the latter. Human rights were deeply interlaced with decolonisation, but decolonisation was not a simple human rights struggle. Empire was built on systematic human rights violations, but its disintegration did not ensure the rights of the individual. This chapter charts the relationship between empire, decolonisation and human rights.It will first assess the extent to which empire itself engaged with human rights ideas, and the precarious place of rights in imperial discourses. There were voices within imperialism that were critical of the treatment of indigenous peoples, and sought to extend their rights in meaningful, if still limited ways. These groups were typically welfarist or humanitarian in orientation-they bore similarities to human rights activists, and on occasion, even invoked the term ‘human rights’, but in ways that were aligned with imperialism, rather than arrayed against it. The concept of human rights has been fiercely contested, and to some degree remains so. Nevertheless, the cardinal features of human rights under international law, and as a post-war political creed, are readily apparent. Foremost, human rights presuppose equal rights for all without distinction. Second, rights properly inhere in all individuals, and are neither given nor removed by the state. Third, they entail a broad and interlocking range of freedoms, both civil and political, such as the right to assembly, and economic and social, for instance, the right to health. All of these freedoms are indivisible and organic; the corpus of rights is unified, or its vision unravels. Various reformist strands of ‘enlightened’ imperialism would persist all the way into the decolonisation era, usually in the guise of development, progress and tutelage towards ‘civilisation’. The notion of imperial duties to subject populations would become a major plank of international organisation, in the League of Nations Permanent Mandates Commission, established in1919, and in the later United Nations Trusteeship Council, established in 1945. In the very latest phase, in the 1940s and 1950s, British and French imperialism sought to marry the revivified post-Second World War concept of universal human rights with the frankly discriminatory premises of empire. The chapter then examines the nexus between human rights and anti-colonialism in thepeak era of decolonisation, between 1948 and 1966. This was the period when human rights were most closely and visibly aligned with anti-imperialism, and when empire was formally denounced as a human rights violation. Internationally, newly independent states were among the strongest proponents of universal human rights. Domestically, there were credible initiatives to build democratic, rights-respecting regimes, so that the new national freedom would become the freedom of each citizen. Across the 1950s in particular, in soaring and universalist terms nationalists linked the rights of the individual to the independence of the nation. For a brief time, some of these aspirations appeared to be realised, and the nationalists of Asia and Africa stood as the last, worldwide extension of a grand tradition that extended back to the Atlantic Revolutions. Such optimism was depressingly short-lived, and this survey concludes with a reflection on the failures of decolonisation as a human rights movement, and the legacies of empire for human rights. Empire failed the citizens of Asia, Africa and the Arab world, but so too, in many cases, did the nation-state. Achieving sovereignty appeared the essential means for securing human rights, yet it almost always proved insufficient. Ultimately, neither imperialism nor the conventional post-colonial state was especially amenable to human rights. It would take another wave of revolution to even partially advance the transition from imperial subject, to national citizen, to universal rights-bearing individual.