Soviet delegates attacked ‘civilised nations’ language as a Cold War universalisation tactic

Evidence

During the early drafting of the UDHR, the Soviet delegate, Vladimir Koretsky, rebuked the great French jurist René Cassin for his use of the phrase ‘civilised nations’. Framing civilisational hierarchies as an anachronism from the age of the tsars, Koretksy argued the phrase had ‘no meaning at the present time’. … The Soviet bloc delegates framed the drafting of an international bill of rights as an opportunity to move beyond the civilisational hierarchies of pre-war international relations. At a time of deep international conflict between defenders of starkly different political and economic systems, the campaign against civilisational hierarchies was one aspect of a broader effort to prevent the universalisation of one rival system under the name of human rights. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 77

Categorization

• QUESTION: How did the phrase ‘civilised nations’ formally disappear from the UDHR text, and did Koretsky’s campaign succeed in scrubbing it?
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s human-rights discourse work: the civilisational-hierarchy contest inside the UDHR drafting parallels the race/hierarchy debates mapped in earlier chapters of this same book. — connects to: Soviet delegates at the UDHR drafts rejected civilisational hierarchy language as obsolete — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 77; Cold War rivals shared a common secular-modern ideological language — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 387

Broader Connections

• Soviet delegates at the UDHR drafts rejected civilisational hierarchy language as obsolete #corroborates (0.92) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 77
• Cold War rivals shared a common secular-modern ideological language #corroborates (0.75) — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 387