Anti-colonial delegates reversed civilising logic, framing human rights as the route to progress

Evidence

Although opponents of the colonial clause rejected Cassin’s advocacy of ‘the instrument of progress, the colonial clause’, they too relied on narratives of progress to depict human rights as civilising technologies. Reversing colonial arguments that civilisation was the prerequisite for human rights, they argued that dependent peoples needed human rights in order to progress from what the Belorussian delegate called their ‘backward condition’. The ‘fact that certain countries were backward in comparison with others’, the Ethiopian delegate agreed, was not grounds for denying their human rights. Rather, ‘the reason for their backward condition was that their population had for so long been denied the opportunity to enjoy fundamental freedoms’. The delegate of the Philippines contested Cassin’s arguments, contending that the ‘right to progress could not be withheld from such peoples just because of their primitive evolution’. The Chilean delegate also argued that the ‘low level of civilization’ of a people did not justify the denial of human rights; ‘civilization was not learnt from books’ he stressed. Rather, ‘it could only be learnt by personal experience and … the enjoyment of human rights was the best teacher of the subject’. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 272

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s existing work on civilising missions and the liberal framing of rights as progressive instruments; also resonates with the broader debate on whether rights discourse is inherently colonial. — connects to: Anti-colonial movements drastically changed UN composition and human rights debates — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 229; Anti-colonial rights advocates unwittingly armed later coercive interventions in global capitalism’s interests — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 273; Accepting progress narratives embedded a colonial civilising logic inside human-rights discourse — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 273 (+3 more)
• SEED: Angle: how anti-colonial delegates at the UDHR adopted progress narratives wholesale, prefiguring how later human-rights discourse would license coercion in the name of development.

Broader Connections

• Accepting progress narratives embedded a colonial civilising logic inside human-rights discourse #contradicts (0.92) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 273
• Key human rights drafters combined universalist rhetoric with colonial paternalism #contradicts (0.85) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 269
• Indo activists explicitly renounced colonial stereotypes of docility #exemplifies (0.75)