“A People’s Democracy on a Universal Scale”: Human Rights against Empire

• In Event: Searching for the Human: Technology, Democracy, and the Politics of Modernity

Abstract

The years immediately following the United Nations founding saw a puzzling rise in the delivery of petitions from American civil rights organizations that drew international attention to racial discrimination in the United States. Scholars have tended to frame these interventions either chiefly as a means of ‘naming and shaming’ the United States into adhering to the global human rights principles that it itself insisted on bringing into existence following World War II (Valdez 2019, 64, 109), or, on the other hand, portray the petitions as employing the language of human rights instrumentally, as a convenient veil for the more familiar and more radical anticolonial language of national self-determination and global emancipation from imperial rule (Moyn 2004, 103).

Against these two interpretations, this paper recovers a historical moment when the language of human rights connoted a robust vision of transnational solidarity against imperial domination. Through a reading of three petitions submitted to the UN by American activist groups – the NNC’s 1946 A Petition to the United Nations, the NAACP’s 1947 An Appeal to the World, and the CRC’s 1951 We Charge Genocide – it argues instead that appeals to international fora for the redress of human rights violations by midcentury American activists were rooted in a vision of anti-imperial global democracy. I take the term “global democracy” to describe the horizon of an anti-imperial political project that encompassed but ultimately transcended both the legal recognition of individual human rights and the right of former and existing colonies to national self-determination. Crucially, the vision of “global democracy” espoused by midcentury American activists such as Max Yergan, W. E. B. Du Bois, and William L. Patterson was pitched in opposition to the dominant image of venues like the UN as sites of deliberation among sovereign democratic states. Midcentury American activists attended to the ways that political and economic domination operated within and across democratic states to strip the majority of the world’s population of democratic recourse against the forces of Euro-American imperialism. If mid-century American activists couched their appeals to the UN in the language of American hypocrisy and violation of human rights, they did so in the service of forging a transnational democratic anti-imperial community.

Author

• Ewa Nizalowska, Cornell University