Imperialism Kritik Index

Link: Human Rights

( ) Human rights promotion in China is meant to destabilize the regime – this is part of the US’s historical project to liberalize China and engineer democratic changes.

[Erik Paul, PhD and Vice President of the Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Sydney. Neoliberal Australia and US Imperialism in East Asia. October 23, 2012. Pg 143-144]

Numerous areas of contestation exist within China itself in human rights fields. The promotion of democracy in China by the US is a strategy designed to destabilise the regime. The US continues its Cold War policy of hammering China on the issue of human rights to bring down the CCP. This promotion of democracy is driven by an obsession about being an exceptional country and an ideological faith that China's modernisation and economic growth must necessarily lead to demands for a US-type liberal democracy. The Dalai Lama, among other luminaries, has argued that China's repressive regime cannot last forever and that eventually people will demand the right to participate freely in choosing their leaders; democracy will be heralded by a coalition of intellectuals and students, he once said (Handler 2011; Johnson 2000: 170). US and other Western-based democracy promotion programmes, run by a wide range of organisations with different agendas, operate in China. The US uses overt and covert strategies to mobilise sections of China's civil society against the state to 'engineer' democracy in China. Among the better-known government-sponsored and private NGOs are the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict (ICNC), the Heritage Foundation, the International Crisis Group, the Albert Einstein Institute, the National Endowment for Democracy, the Arlington Institute, Freedom House, the Center for Journalists and the United States Institute of Peace. Some work closely with the CIA and other government agencies, such as the Defense Department, the US Information Agency and the US Agency for International Development, as well as US-based universities.

¶ The funding of secessionist movements in Tibet, Xinjiang and elsewhere in China to undermine the rule of the CCP is a continuation of the US policy of supporting nationalist forces against Mao Zedong's Communist Party before 1949. Uighurs, Mongols and Tibetans are the three main distinct minorities in the sparsely populated and autonomous regions of Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia and Tibet, all of which have strong separatist tendencies. These are on the periphery of what is viewed by Western intelligence as part of a Chinese empire that is prone to disintegration. During the Cold War in Xinjiang, the Uighur Muslims were mobilised against China; the fighting escalated with the largest ever clandestine operation by the US to recruit, train and arm Islamic militants from all over the world, including Xinjiang. Some were captured at the time of the US invasion of Afghanistan and were interrogated in various US-contracted torture centres. A major disturbance took place in 2009 when riots between the Uighurs and the Han Chinese killed some 200 people. It is probable that US-based operations are now helping the Uighurs in their demands for self-determination to oppose the rule of the CCP in various ways. Xinjiang's ties with some states in Central Asia provide channels for its activities against the Chinese state. Prior to 9/11, according to Eric Margolis, US intelligence was giving aid and support both to the Taliban and to al-Qaeda. Margolis claims that 'the CIA was planning to use Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida to stir up Muslim Uighurs against Chinese rule, and to employ Taliban against Russia's Central Asian allies' (Margolis 2009a). From the mid-1950s to 1969, Tibet was the target for one of the CIA's major covert operations. Hundreds of Tibetan exiles were trained in Colorado and Okinawa in a secret programme, which ended in 1968, to fight a guerrilla war against the invading forces of communist China (Johnson 2000: 70). Pressure on China continues with the open support by the US of the Dalai Lama's activities in support of Tibetan autonomy and the promotion of human rights in China. Regional aspiration for autonomy is also widespread among the three major southern dialect groups in the Hong Kong-Guangdong region (Eronen 1998: 7-8).

Link: Human Rights

( ) Human rights discourse is a form of cultural imperialism based on the implicit superiority of European modes of thinking.

Chowdhury, 2013

[Tanzil Chowdhury is the President's Doctoral Scholar in the Law School, University of Manchester. His research interests include Critical Legal Theory, Third World Approaches to International Law and Jurisprudence. In addition to being a co-founder of the Northern Police Monitoring Project he is also an editor for the National Students Law Journal. “‘Exporting Ethics’: The Case Against Human Rights Universalism.” October 3, 2013. https://ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/exporting-ethics-human-rights-universalised/]

Cultural Imperialism was thus the residue of the decolonisation process that embedded the praxis of western cultural legacies in the former colonies. In effect, the ‘exporting ethic’, deployed through universalisation, re-ignites and reconstitutes these residual legacies, transporting them through unequal trade agreements, ratification of western-inspired legal instruments or ‘democratizing’ wars. It assumes that these Western actors are the ubiquitous moral arbiter, thus regurgitating old colonial narratives of ‘civilising the barbarians.’¶ These Western actors are additionally faced with a whole host of questions. Pushing aside a less than impressive track record, how do businesses, in particular, respond to promoting ‘ethics’ when importing oil or exporting weapons? This moral quagmire, quasi-perpetual rather than merely transitory, exploits the vernacular of human rights discourse to essentially endorse capital accumulation.¶ Amidst the enthusiasm for ‘Project: Human Rights Everywhere’ is an ignorance of gigantic proportions. Part of the enthusiasm stems from the tendency to use our human rights as a barometer for transgressions committed elsewhere. But more importantly, in their haste and excitement, global actors reduce rights to ‘points in time’ on a Euclidean line rather than understanding that they are the terminus of a process. Such rights are always fought for and their actualization through legal instruments merely formalises these victories. The suffragettes in the UK brought the canonisation of women’s liberation into British legislation. It was the culmination of a mass social movement, shaped by the industrial revolution and illogic of the era. It was a truly British experience that resulted in a British outcome.¶

The failure of global actors in their universalising mission comes in their inability to recognise that these processes are temporally, spatially and thus culturally unique. For example, rights conceived in the West attribute the fundamental social unit to the individual, a notion generally alien to the communitarian values of the Global South. As such, this transplanting of the ‘western experience’ onto non-Western shores commits a blunder rooted in intellectual arrogance. But it is the limits of our consciousness that prevent us from seeing human rights as a durational process, as historical events which are vulnerable to all the impulses and structures of life. Appreciating this reality would allow us to unravel the complexities and nuances of the struggles and, in doing so, situate rights temporally and spatially.¶ Fundamentally, one has to question why ‘ethics’, and its vehicle of human rights, have become a part of the programme for states, business and institutions. The post-68 attitude of ‘cultural capitalism’, as Slavoj Zizek phrases it, attempts to disguise the brutishness of capitalism – particularly in its unforgiving, Friedmanesque sense – with a human face. The ‘exporting ethic’ and its universalising mission have bequeathed a similar tragedy of anthropomorphism. Oil-leviathan Halliburton boasts of a ‘Supplier Ethics Statement’ and other community initiatives that seem incompatible with the scandals that have despoiled the company. Yet it continues to rake in increasing profits. This paradox resides in inherently-unequal institutions engaging in the business of equalising. Of course, this ‘exporting ethic’ merely allows for the agent’s redemption, to appease its conscience from the toxic externalities of its day-to-day operation.¶

Universalising human rights, conceived in our Western corner of the globe, is an exercise in degradation, indignity and egotism. However, one should hasten to add that this position is not against human rights per se. Who would subscribe to such a school? Rather, it is the assumption – and its accompanying arrogance – that such a programme can be universalised when it packages the experiences of a specific geographic region.¶ Of course, the real culprits are the actors of this crusade. Not only are their intentions disingenuous, but they have resulted in the proliferation of greater enmity, animosity and inequality. Our difficulty comes in our hastiness to use our human rights as applicable standard for the rest of the world. Costas Douzinas puts it thus: “social and political systems become hegemonic by turning their ideological priorities into universal principles and values. In the new world order, human rights are the perfect candidate for this role. Their core principles interpreted negatively and economically, promote neoliberal capitalist domination.”¶

Ultimately, the vocabulary of universal or global rights ignores the endemic ill-distribution of power within the international system, assuming a default level-playing field where none exists. It wrongfully de-temporalises all the actors, assuming the same histories, resources and experiences for all. Rights that we have, by virtue of our very existence, are of paramount importance, of course, but they should be grown and nurtured from the roots within, not edified and imposed from without.

Link: Human Rights

( ) The western emphasis on human rights have become the latest version of the civilizing mission

Douzinas, 2008

[Costas Douzinas, law professor at Birkbeck, University of London. “The ‘end’ of human rights.” December 10, 2008. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2008/dec/10/humanrights-unitednations]

Over the last 30 years human rights have triumphed. They unite left and right, north and south, church and state. The cosmopolitan world order promises the fulfilment of Enlightenment principles and an end to strife.¶ Yet human rights have only paradoxes to offer. Despite the statements about a universal right to life, every day brings more atrocious news from Darfur, Congo, Palestine and Mumbai. Despite pious statements about equality and dignity, at no other period has there been such huge economic gap between north and south or between the rich and the poor. According to an Oxfam report in October, over 1 billion people do not have enough food.¶ Human rights are an expression of the human urge to resist public and private domination and oppression. Their force unites Chinese dissidents, the defenders of refugees, immigrants and detainees of the war on terror as well as schoolkids in Greece. In the hands of western governments however they have become the latest version of the civilising mission.¶ In the west, the rise of neoliberal capitalism coincided with the cosmopolitan and humanitarian turn. The spread of human rights is not the result of the liberal or charitable disposition of the west exported to the south along with the second hand clothes offered to Oxfam. Global moral and civic rules are the necessary companion of neoliberal capitalism. Over the last 30 years, legal rules regulating investment, trade, aid and intellectual property have emerged. The World Bank, the IMF and the WTO impose "economic restructuring" conditions on developing states in loan and aid agreements. These constrain their ability to make decisions about wage levels, education, health and social security policies, they dictate the privatisation of public services and utilities and open trade while maintaining the protective policies for crucial western agricultural and manufacturing sectors.¶ Robert Cooper has called these arrangements the voluntary imperialism of the global economy. It is an imperialism "acceptable to a world of human rights and cosmopolitan values". Economic rules have been supplemented by various treaties and rhetorical statements on rights which prepare the future world citizen, highly moralised and regulated, but also highly materially differentiated despite the common rights everyone should enjoy from Helsinki to Hanoi.¶ The (implicit) promise to the developing world that adoption of the neoliberal model of good governance and limited rights will inexorably lead to western economic standards is fraudulent. Historically, the western ability to turn the protection of formal rights into a limited guarantee of material, economic and social rights was based on huge transfers of value from the colonies to the metropolis. The necessary reverse flows are not politically feasible. The successive crises and re-arrangements of neoliberal capitalism lead to dispossession and displacement of family farming by agribusiness, to forced migration and urbanisation. These processes expand the number of people without skills, status or the basics for existence. They become human debris, the waste-life, the bottom billion.¶ The new lingua franca of cosmopolitanism and humanitarianism presents the globe as a common symbolic space which promises prosperity, equal rights and perpetual peace. But as Immanuel Wallerstein put it, "if all humans have equal rights, and all the peoples have equal rights, then we cannot maintain the kind of inegalitarian system that the capitalist world-economy has always been and always will be." Neoliberal capitalism's "human waste" is presented as a natural disaster or inevitable life contingency and is abandoned to the magnanimity of philanthropists and the good will of pop stars.¶ When the chasm between the missionary statements on equality and dignity and the bleak reality of obscene inequality becomes apparent, the false promises of humanitarianism will lead to uncontrollable types of tension and conflict. Spanish soldiers met the advancing Napoleonic armies, shouting "Down with freedom!" It is not difficult to imagine people meeting the "peacekeepers" of the New Times with cries of "Down with human rights!"¶ Social and political systems become hegemonic by turning their ideological priorities into universal principles and values. In the new world order, human rights are the perfect candidate for this role. Their core principles, interpreted negatively and economically, promote neoliberal capitalist domination. This is not inevitable. If formulated differently, their abstract provisions could subject the inequalities and indignities of late capitalism to withering attack. But this cannot happen when the critique of injustice is formulated in the terms of that which begets and supports injustice. The usefulness of rights comes to an end when they lose their aim of resisting injustice.

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