Postcolonial states wielded human rights to justify resource nationalization

Evidence

With decision-making power in the Bretton-Woods international financial institutions weighted towards wealthy states, the UN became the site of what one historian has called ‘a strangely secluded and artificial version of the broader struggle for independence’. This created a new relationship between the human rights project and broader debates about development and the rights of people to sovereignty over their natural resources. In its final form, the Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights embodies this new focus. According to its Article 1.2, ‘All peoples may, for their own ends, freely dispose of their natural wealth and resources.’ Realising the neoliberals’ worst fears, delegates from recently independent states increasingly pursued an agenda of permanent sovereignty over natural resources, which sought to secure the ‘inalienable right’ of sovereign states to dispose of the resources located in their territories, including by nationalising the foreign companies that had hitherto exploited them. ‘Today’s “human rights” as formulated by the UN’, Röpke wrote in a 1965 letter, ‘include the sacred right of a state to expropriate a power plant’. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 286

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to the reader’s stated purpose: the human-rights discourse was claimed not just by Westerners but by postcolonial states against foreign capital — a reversal of the usual narrative of human rights serving neoliberalism. — connects to: Economic rights claims grew directly from anti-neocolonial struggles — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 230; Human-rights language served to restrain postcolonial popular sovereignty — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 295; National emancipation came to be seen as a precondition for human rights (+1 more)
• DEFINE: Clarifies what ‘permanent sovereignty over natural resources’ means as a doctrine and how it entered the ICESCR.
• SHARE: The Röpke quote — today’s human rights include the sacred right to expropriate a power plant — is a sharp exchange-worthy quip for someone into the history of economic liberal thought.

Broader Connections

• Human-rights language served to restrain postcolonial popular sovereignty #contradicts (0.85) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 295
• National emancipation came to be seen as a precondition for human rights #expands (0.75)
• Neoliberals framed human rights as a tool to enforce global standards protecting private capital #expands (0.75)