"Co-opting the once revolutionary concepts of universal human rights, neoliberals refashioned the idea of freedom by tying it fundamentally to the free market, and turning it into a weapon to be used against anticolonial projects all over the world."
jacobinmag.com/2020/01/morals…
They made explicit links between the values of “civilisation” and the imperialist logic of the League of Nations’ mandate system which claimed to support “peoples not yet able to stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern world” by forcing “open-door” trade.
"The center was established, Whyte demonstrates, to challenge “the affirmations of postcolonial sovereignty and economic self-determination” of Third Worldist arguments at the time. Springing from the same logic that once prompted Fanon to observe ...
... “Europe is literally the creation of the Third World,” Third Worldism — as a movement and school of thought — aimed to address the profound disparity in global wealth and resources caused by hundreds of years of European looting."
"Key human rights NGOs actively embraced a neoliberal approach to freedom, twinned with a neoliberal suspicion of politics, that all too eagerly transferred the entirety of the blame for violence, instability, and poverty in the Third World onto Third World states themselves."
"Moreover, NGO embracement of neoliberal human rights gave, in Whyte’s words, a “progressive gloss” to the anti–Third Worldist agenda of organisations like the IMF, the World Bank, and those Great Powers who supported their policies of abusive austerity."
"This “progressive gloss” was especially useful for assuaging the consciences of metropolitan liberals who — in the wake of obviously imperialist forms of US interventionism — were feeling a bit queasy about the postcolonial relationship of the West to the Rest."
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