The UDHR encoded development hierarchy into universal human rights

Evidence

The drafting of the UDHR saw a similarly significant shift in the language of classification and ranking, even as it purported to codify the rights of a universal humanity. The United States, which was both less invested than the UK and France in the old order of European colonialism and more anxious about allowing the Soviets to monopolise the language of progress, worked to construct a civilisational discourse adequate to a new era of universal rights. Eleanor Roosevelt told the delegates that while there were ‘peoples of different levels of development in various parts of the world’, this did not mean they were naturally inferior, but that they had not had the same opportunities for development. Such arguments would become central to the neoliberal civilising missions of the later twentieth century. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 84

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth chasing: which specific passages of the UDHR drafting record carry this ‘levels of development’ frame, and how did later human-rights-as-conditionality practice cite them?
• SEED: Article angle: ‘equal rights for every civilized man’ — how universal-rights rhetoric from Rhodes to the UDHR to IMF conditionality has always presupposed a development hierarchy deciding who is ready for rights.
• XREF: Connects directly to the reader’s interest in human-rights discourse as it bears on market ethics: rights here are not prior to markets, they are granted on civilizational/developmental terms.