The Colonialism of Human Rights. Colin Samson
extensively in chapter 4 – the complicated double electoral college system gave 1 million European settlers equivalent voting power to over 8 million indigenous Algerians.73 Although, as Cooper argues, these inequalities were always malleable and subject to ‘claim-making from below’,74 they underline the necessity for the colonial state of creating different citizenship regimes and also of modifying access to rights occasionally to placate indigenous populations. But, equal voting rights could never have been built into colonialism, since such rights could undermine colonialism itself. By the 1970s, at the close of the formal colonial era, however, there was a change from dealing with subjects under French dominion, with at least some rights, in France to dealing with immigrants or refugees with a whole different set of rights and exclusions.
The paradox and problem here is that, while nation-states can be charged by individuals, groups and other states with human rights violations, only individuals can be held to account through the various tribunals, courts and reconciliation efforts. Migrants rights advocates in Britain and civil rights activists in the USA might petition for recognition of their clients’ human rights, but all channels of appeal are part of the state that ultimately adjudicates all grievances, including those against its own institutions. Some of these institutions, of course, are responsible for formulating, implementing and enforcing rights that may well discriminate between different categories of humanity. In the context of this ‘statist bias’, Catherine Lu calls the circumstances arising from colonialism structural injustice and argues that the rendering of justice should go ‘beyond victims and perpetrators and toward the institutional, normative and material conditions in which they interact’.75 This, of course, has not occurred, in part because, returning to Charles Mills, race has underpinned the entire liberal framework of social and political thought from the outset, and at the same time it has largely been excluded from liberal debates on rights.76
Differentiations in access and entitlement to human rights within Western states that have made racial civic stratification the norm can be traced to the first acts of European colonization, when tortuous debates over the rights of indigenous peoples resulted in indigenous and enslaved peoples simply becoming inferior rights-bearing subjects within the larger colonial order.77 I will have more to say on the continuities in these particular patterns in chapter 5, but differential treatment of indigenous peoples in settler colonial states reinforces the fact that Europeans have long represented indigenous peoples as biologically, culturally and – therefore – juridically inferior.
One of the measures of this today is in Canada where huge rates of murdered and missing indigenous women and girls have sparked substantial activism. A national enquiry on the subject published in 2019, as part of which over 2,300 affected people were interviewed, concluded that this amounted to genocide in both sociological and legal terms. The report argued strenuously that these tragedies were structurally embedded in Canada’s settler colonial society. ‘Ultimately, and despite different circumstances and backgrounds, what connects all these deaths’, the report stated, ‘is colonial violence, racism and oppression’.78 Police and medical authorities either did not respond appropriately, or in some cases were implicated in rapes and deaths. In Australia, the abduction of Aboriginal children who formed the ‘stolen generations’ underlies the common experience of denial of human rights to indigenous populations in settler colonial states. Scholars using Raphael Lemkin’s original definition of genocide as involving the forcible transfer of children from one group to another and the elimination of culture have classified this as genocide.79 In the liberal states of Canada and Australia, indigenous peoples are still victims of the murderous acts that prompted the formalization of human rights.
Rightlessness
Looking within the internal European context, we could say that civic stratification was given more immediate impetus in the uprooting, removal and deportation of populations, especially across Central and Eastern Europe, in the late nineteenth and into the early twentieth centuries. This was done to create ethnically homogeneous zones under specific government authority as part of nation-building exercises. The processes by which rights were segmented, stratified and denied in Europe echoed the differentiation of rights under colonialism, and are articulated today as nation-states claim exclusive powers to define citizenship.
In the early twentieth century, men were conscripted and moved all over Europe to train in various national armies, and they were used by nations aligned against each other to protect, and sometimes enlarge, their highly stratified internal national orders. Although commemorated on the medal I inherited from my grandfather as ‘The Great War for Civilisation’, the result was 50 million dead from 1914 to 1919 in World War I. British writers who fought in that war, including Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves and Wilfrid Owen, often depicted it as being fought for no greater principles than the national vanities of governments and politicians. The unwilling recruits whom Sassoon wrote of in Memoirs of an Infantry Officer were inducted into a mechanical and inhuman undertaking. ‘What in earlier days had been drafts of volunteers’, he writes, ‘were now droves of victims’.80 Later in his recollections, he describes the purpose of his and other soldiers’ sacrifices as being the upholding of a society of extreme class privilege. As he put it following conversations with Lady Brassey of Chapelwood Manor, Sussex (fictionalized as Lady Asterisk at Nutwood Manor), where he was convalescing: ‘outwardly emotionless, she symbolized the patrician privileges for whose preservation I had chucked bombs at Germans and carelessly offered myself as a target for a sniper’.81 These ‘patrician privileges’ allowed members of higher social classes simply to become officers, with access to recuperation in manor houses in England, while working-class recruits shortened their odds of survival in makeshift hospital tents at the front. Additionally, the 3 million troops from the Commonwealth, including a million from British India, were also enlisted in what was depicted as an imperial cause. They fought on the Western front and they were not given the same food, medicines or remuneration as white soldiers.82
The reinforcing of internal British class divisions through World War I was mirrored by Germany where, as Schmitt commented, ‘to demand seriously of human beings that they kill others and be prepared to die themselves so that trade and industry may flourish for the survivors or that the purchasing power of grandchildren may grow is sinister and crazy’.83 In the same milieu of violence and class rivalry, ethnic and national divisions were changed as the boundaries of European states were continuously redrawn to create several distinct nation-states that were previously under the dominion of various Empires. The interwar period was also a period of mass unemployment, poverty, widespread malnutrition, starvation and economic depression throughout mainland Europe. As Hannah Arendt observed in ‘The Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man’,84 numerous peoples simply either became unwanted ‘minorities’ in these new states or were deprived of all rights because they did not have a nationality that coincided with the state they happened to live in. This provoked another mass exodus of such peoples to other states in which they sometimes had a nationality, but, because they were not born in the territory, they did not have citizenship rights. Only nationals could be citizens, and only citizens could have rights. Within each state, there could be people of varying juridical statuses, and scores without citizenship guarantees. As with many of those caught up in the ‘migration crisis’ in Europe today, there were people who had no human rights in the territories they were born in and, likewise, no rights in the places to which they fled.
For Arendt, the realignment of states following World War I catalysed the problem of human beings who may be refugees, minorities or stateless, but who to one degree or another are without the right to have rights. Those who fell into these categories were victims of the establishment of nation-states, the preconditions for which are ‘homogeneity of population and rootedness in the soil’.85 The problem was that, within the reconfigured boundaries of mid-twentieth-century Europe, the national homogeneity that was the underlying premise of citizenship and hence access to rights, did not prevail, especially in Eastern Europe. In these circumstances, the link between birth and nation