Human-rights language served to restrain postcolonial popular sovereignty

Evidence

Rüstow’s fellow panellists at the 1957 ‘Liberalism and Colonialism’ session reacted violently to his critique of European colonialism. Yet they too sought to develop a language to pathologise postcolonial sovereignty and transform the postcolonial state into a barrier against the popular aspirations of its people – not a vehicle for their realisation. For the neoliberals, sovereignty had never been the telos of the civilising mission. Quite the opposite, their challenge was always to restrain popular sovereignty, to prevent ‘the masses’ from capturing the state and refusing the discipline imposed by the competitive market order. Freed from its relation to popular sovereignty and economic self-determination, the language of human rights offered them a means to legitimise transformative interventions and subject postcolonial states to universal standards aimed at protecting the international market. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 295

Categorization

• DEFINE: States precisely how human-rights discourse functioned as a disciplinary instrument against popular sovereignty rather than its ally.
• XREF: Directly feeds the reader’s stated project on human-rights discourse and market ethics. — connects to: Key human rights drafters combined universalist rhetoric with colonial paternalism — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 269; Anticolonialists defended universal rights against cultural-difference exceptions — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 271; Accepting progress narratives embedded a colonial civilising logic inside human-rights discourse — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 273 (+9 more)

Broader Connections

• Human rights language was mobilized against demands for postcolonial economic redistribution. #expands (0.92) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 379
• Human-rights rhetoric can relocate redress authority toward imperial overseers #corroborates (0.90)
• Neoliberals weaponized human rights language to protect private property and market order #exemplifies (0.85) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 76
• Postwar human-rights lawyers deliberately repurposed rights language away from anti-colonialism toward US power #corroborates (0.82) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 449
• The French Revolution fused human rights with national sovereignty #contradicts (0.72)