Key human rights drafters combined universalist rhetoric with colonial paternalism

Evidence

Cassin, a key drafter of the UDHR, is regularly celebrated as a great universalist, but his universalism coexisted with a deep belief in the civilising role of colonial rule, and the legitimacy of violence in sustaining it. As the French state jailed nationalist electoral candidates in Algeria and Britain waged violent counterinsurgencies in Palestine and Malaya, both delegations argued for colonial clauses to take account for the fact that the territories under their administration were ‘constantly progressing along the road to self-government and independence’, as the UK delegate put it. Cassin too relied on an idea of measured progress to argue that applying covenants automatically to non-self-governing territories would ‘result in a general alignment at the level of the most backward people’, as France could not impose progressive measures that her subjects were unable to understand ‘on account of their attachment to their own traditions’. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 269

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s human-rights-discourse literature; also resonates with postcolonial critiques of liberal universalism familiar from Edward Said and Talal Asad. — connects to: Colonial powers opposed universal human rights extending to their own subjects — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 268; Human-rights rhetoric can relocate redress authority toward imperial overseers; Accepting progress narratives embedded a colonial civilising logic inside human-rights discourse — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 273 (+8 more)
• SEED: Potential angle: how the same civilizational-progress argument used to justify colonial clauses recurs in contemporary ‘developmental’ qualifications on human rights in trade and aid conditionality.

Broader Connections

• Colonial reformers’ ethical indignation coexisted with colonial privilege #exemplifies (0.85)
• Human-rights rhetoric can relocate redress authority toward imperial overseers #expands (0.82)
• Human rights rhetoric masks imperial assumptions that racialize colonized peoples #expands (0.80)
• Colonial rule frames subject peoples as wards needing Western paternal judgment #expands (0.80) — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 120
• Accepting progress narratives embedded a colonial civilising logic inside human-rights discourse #qualifies (0.75) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 273
• Human-rights language served to restrain postcolonial popular sovereignty #expands (0.75) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 295
• Civilizing rhetoric normalized subjecthood by casting Africans as future citizens #qualifies (0.72) — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 364