Equal-vote UN drafting broke with the mandate system’s elite moral authority

Evidence

The UN human rights process of the 1940s, which gave each sovereign state an equal vote, broke starkly with the elite moral authority Rappard distilled from the mandate system. The involvement of non-European states and representatives of the Soviet bloc in the drafting process seemed to the neoliberals to be a reflection of the crisis of civilisation, not a solution to it. During the drafting of the UDHR, delegates from China and Saudi Arabia, among others, sought to relativise ‘Western civilisation’ and remind the European powers that a declaration of human rights could not be based on a single cultural tradition. The presence of delegates who had once been excluded from ‘civilised’ law-making bodies changed the terms of the debate. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 97

Categorization

• XREF: This reframes ‘civilisation’ as a juridical-status category — connects to why postcolonial delegates had standing or not — parallel to my reading of human-rights-discourse debates.
• DEFINE: The passage clarifies what ‘civilisation’ meant as a legal category: that before becoming ‘civilised nations’ certain societies were simply ‘Christendom’ — a status-based, exclusionary concept.