Protectionists cast offshoring as exploitative colonial harm abroad

Evidence

Since colonized elites played a crucial part in exploiting their own people (even if they did so under the protection of the colonizer), it is too simplistic to assign all the blame to the colonizers. Thus, postcolonialism attempts to offer a more nuanced analysis of colonialism and its repercussions, particularly with respect to the ways in which the relationship between former colonizer and colonized continues to shape the realities of both groups in the contemporary world. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 259 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Scholar-activist Sidney Lens summarized US aims as follows: to establish an “open door” policy that allowed it to enter into otherwise blocked-off markets and establish multinational trade as the pillar of economic policy; to weaken and isolate forces that opposed the open door (which included both the former colonial powers as well as radical nationalists and communists); and to gain, as President Kennedy put it, “influence and control” over pliant governments, typically right-wing, through “grants and loans with conditions attached to them, military aid, equipment and training of puppet armies, military pacts, CIA-sponsored revolts, and on occasion, when these other methods were inadequate … direct intervention by U.S. armed forces themselves.” — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 246 (#complicates, via linked claim)

As implied by the Czech delegate’s jest about jet-propelled planes, opponents of the colonial clause sought to accelerate the process of modernisation. In arguing that human rights were prerequisites for civilisation, they accepted the directional account of progress that underpinned colonial civilising claims. On the one hand, they challenged metropolitan arguments that the culture of the colonised constituted an insuperable barrier to the exercise of human rights, and contested the metropolitan prerogative to determine when ‘native’ culture had been sufficiently reformed. On the other hand, they largely accepted the necessity of such reform, and depicted the exercise of human rights as a civilising practice that would promote the modernisation of ‘backward’ or ‘primitive’ peoples. Faced with the cultural-relativist arguments of the colonial powers, most opponents of the colonial clause now distanced themselves from the Saudi delegate Jamil Baroody’s earlier warnings that the UDHR was based primarily on Western philosophies and cultural patterns. They accepted, at least rhetorically, the superiority of the self-possessed, modern individual of human rights over the ‘primitive’ native condition. In doing so, they unwittingly prefigured the later repurposing of human rights; in a changed geopolitical context, the civilising mission of human rights would license coercive interventions to remake societies, subjectivities and economies in the interests of global capitalism. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 273 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Offshoring diffuses responsibility for sweatshop harms through proxy producers — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 135; Economic protectionism applied within a state to internal minorities mirrors colonial exploitation; Overseas bases cause environmental damage, crime, displacement, and colonial relations — David Vine, Base Nation_ How U.S. Military Bases…, 32 (+13 more)

Broader Connections

• Colonized elites also helped exploit their own people under colonial protection. #complicates (0.75) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 259
• US anti-colonialism aimed to supplant old empires for its own economic access #complicates (0.74) — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 246
• Anti-colonial rights advocates unwittingly armed later coercive interventions in global capitalism’s interests #complicates (0.72) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 273
• Decolonization dissolved empire-specific protected markets into a single global market #complicates (0.71) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 1337