The UDHR’s civilisational language was abandoned due to external challenges, not European self-doubt

Evidence

It was challenges from outside Europe, more than the often-cited post-war loss of faith among Europeans in their own civilisation, that helped rid the UDHR of the language of civilisation. It is commonly argued that wartime atrocities made legal distinctions between civilised and uncivilised societies anachronistic. From this perspective, the UDHR’s affirmations of human equality indicated that chastened European powers had renounced racial and civilisational hierarchies in favour of universal humanism. But the view that the horrors of the war destabilised the distinction between the civilised and the uncivilised tacitly accepts that only atrocities committed against Europeans, and not colonial genocide, massacre and slavery, were sufficient to render European claims to civilisational superiority suspect. Two years after the adoption of the UDHR, the Martiniquian poet and politician Aimé Césaire argued that ‘the very distinguished, very humanistic, very Christian bourgeois’ is unable to forgive the Nazis not for the ‘crime against man’ as such, but rather for ‘the crime against the white man … and the fact that he applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the coolies of India, and the blacks of Africa’. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 103

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s work on human-rights discourse and decolonial critique; echoes Aimé Césaire’s Discours sur le colonialisme which reframes Nazi crimes as colonial procedures applied back onto Europeans. — connects to: Soviet delegates at the UDHR drafts rejected civilisational hierarchy language as obsolete — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 77
• SEED: Angle: how the standard narrative of the UN’s founding as a chastened, universalist project erases colonial violence from the moral history of human rights — relevant to a piece on the colonial origins of human-rights discourse.

Broader Connections

• Soviet delegates at the UDHR drafts rejected civilisational hierarchy language as obsolete #corroborates (0.85) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 77