8.2 THE UNITED NATIONS, THE UNIVERSAL DECLARATION OF HUMAN RIGHTS AND SOVEREIGNTY

One of the consequences of the Second World War was the demise of the League of Nations and the foundation of the United Nations in 1945. There was of course a great deal of continuity between the two institutions.

When it was founded in 1920, the League of Nations marked a new phase in the history of international organization and offered a new way for colonized peoples to attempt to circumvent colonial legal structures and reach outside colonial empires to an international body. But at the same time, the League rested on and promoted a particular conception of the international order. In this conception, self-government, and thus full membership of international society, depended on having achieved a standard of civilization which was defined in terms of the culture and institutions of the modern West.

This conception travelled far beyond the League's debating chambers. For instance, in the pages of Mambo Leo, a periodical published by the Education Department in Tanganyika which played a key role in explaining Tanganyika's new status as a League of Nations Mandate, the League was tellingly described in 1923 as an association of ‘civilized nations'.^[527] Since full membership of international society depended on achieving ‘civilization', then much discussion in the public spheres of the colonial world focused on what ‘civilization' meant and how to achieve it.

Yet alongside a discourse which divided the world into those parts which were deemed to be ‘civilized' and those which were in progress towards ‘civilization', a division often by the late nineteenth century understood in racial terms, there was a powerful trend of thought which argued for an international order based on equality. Cemil Aydin has shown how pan­Asian and pan-Islamic thought provided ways of claiming an equal place in the world. In the first half of the twentieth century, pan-Africanist thought increasingly played a similar role in Africa and the Atlantic world.^[529] The 1940s marked a key transitional moment in the history of this counter-narrative of thinking and activism demanding equal rights for all, linking this demand to a language of freedom, self-determination and democracy. This shift was embedded in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). This declaration affirmed the principle that all human beings were ‘born free and equal in dignity and rights'. These rights were owing to all and by virtue of their humanity, not as members of a particular state.

Although the Declaration increasingly came in the second half of the twentieth century to be seen as overly dependent on a Western tradition of individual rights, at the time it was understood to be a new attempt to articulate a set of principles which could be common to all. In 1947, the recently established UNESCO brought together thinkers from across the world to feed into the process. The explicitly global foundations and reach of the UDHR marked a change from anything which had come before.

An understanding of a right to elect one's own government as being a universal right, not, as under the League, restricted to those who had achieved a standard of ‘civilization', was embodied in the foundation of the United Nations Trusteeship Council in 1947 that provided international oversight of those territories which had formerly been League of Nations Mandates.^[530] Whereas the mandate system envisaged a long and slow path to self­government, particularly for those territories classed as ‘B’ or ‘C’ mandates, the United Nations had a much shorter time frame in mind.

One part of the history of the 1940s and 1950s was therefore the new articulation of a domain at the international level to which individuals and groups in colonized societies could appeal, circumventing the efforts of colonial states to contain their populations within their borders. For those parts of Africa that had been German colonies and became League of Nations mandates, the League had offered a new site of politics, particularly through the petitioning system. The circumstances in which petitions could be sent to the League of Nations were tightly controlled, and petitions had to come through the mandatory power, if they were sent from the mandate itself. The right to petition the League was employed far more enthusiastically in some mandate territories than others - indeed, very few petitions were received from Tanganyika. Nevertheless, the right to petition opened up a new space. As Susan Pedersen has written, ‘[petitioning [the League] mattered not because it offered petitioners redress but because it allowed them to enter and speak in a multi-vocal, international arena. It was one of the key mechanisms (publicity being another) through which a previously binary relationship - colonizer, colonized - was triangulated.'^[532]

The United Nations in turn offered still more possibilities for addressing an international audience. Trusteeship territories were visited every three years by a Visiting Mission, and these Visiting Missions travelled around Trusteeship territories, meeting groups and individuals and receiving petitions. But the international and the local did not only intersect in Africa, they also met in New York, where petitioners could appear before the Trusteeship Council to state their case.

In Tanganyika too, the status of being a United Nations Trusteeship Territory shaped the way Tanganyikan intellectuals and activists thought about their place in the world. When the Trusteeship Agreement was reached in 1946, it was translated into Swahili by the Government's Information Officer and copies were distributed throughout the Territory.^[536] Tanganyikans took seriously the idea that the British did not have unlimited sovereignty over Tanganyika, but that the governance of Tanganyika was under international supervision. According to government reports, at the meeting in 1954 which led to the establishment of Tanganyika's nationalist party, TANU, ‘[t]here was much play with the notion that the territory is governed by the United Nations with Britain acting in a clerical capacity and that the Queen is not the Queen of Tanganyika and should not be referred to as “Our Sovereign”'.^[537]

In turn, TANU sought to make the wider population aware of Tanganyika's status, publishing and distributing a Swahili-language document about the Trusteeship Council.^[538] They also made productive use of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

The ability to transcend colonial borders and to appeal to the United Nations on the basis of rights owing to all by virtue of their humanity was an important part of the international history of decolonization. But as recent research has emphasized, there is another aspect to the place of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in the international thought of decolonization. Many of those who responded to UNESCO focused not on the rights of individuals but on the importance of society and the relationships between individuals within societies. The drafting committee itself included people such as Eleanor Roosevelt, whose thinking was firmly situated within an Anglo-American tradition, but also figures such as Charles Malik, Carlos Romulo and Rene Cassin, whose focus was much more on individuals within society, and on these individuals' duties as well as their rights. The result, as Samuel Moyn has emphasized, was that the UDHR was ‘a profoundly com­munitarian document - precisely a moral repudiation of dangerous individualism, albeit one equally intended to steer equally clear of communism'.^[541]

For the philosopher Jacques Maritain, who played a key role in linking the natural law tradition and a language of human rights in the early 1940s and went on to play an important role in the creation of the UDHR, man was by nature a ‘political animal', inclined to form political society.

The right to participate in government, and the injunction in the Declaration that the ‘will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government', was developed in this context. Creating new states was not an end in itself but an essential step in order to enable human flourishing. Considering this element of mid-twentieth-century thinking reminds us of the positive case for sovereignty, not simply as the removal of illegitimate colonial power but as an argument that only by acquiring the right to choose their own government would it be possible for people to embark on building a better future. It was this transformative potential which made sovereignty so attractive, and which explains why so many people at the time were so invested in it.

This point may seem obvious, but it bears repeating in the light of the disappointments that followed independence in Africa, and the sense that this independence was compromised in practice by the persistent ability of more powerful states, international institutions and corporations to exert their will on weaker states. Despite these later disappointments, independence at the time was not considered as simply the result of a juridical transaction which saw Western forms of political order imposed on non-Western societies. Sovereignty was imagined not simply as a transfer of power from one set of elites to another, but as constituting an exciting moment of possibility, one in which the citizens as well as the leaders of new states were invested.

When we explore the political language of the time in new African states, we are reminded of the nexus of positive terms associated with independent statehood - independence, self-government, sovereignty.^[543] For the Kenyan nationalist Tom Mboya, it was the patriarchal metaphor of independence as being able to shut the door on one's own house which resonated. For others, it was the potential which independence offered to make choices and to build a new society. As Martti Koskenniemi has written, this is the realm of the ‘bright side to sovereignty that describes the character of collective life as a project - a set of institutions or practices in which the forms of collective life are con­stantly imagined, debated, criticized and reformed, over and again'.^[544]

Independence was thus not an end in itself; it meant the ability to create a new and better society. For the Ghanaian nationalist leader Kwame Nkrumah, writing in 1947, ‘[t]he peoples of the colonies know precisely what they want. They wish to be free and independent, to be able to feel themselves on an equal footing with all other peoples and to work out their own destiny without outside interference and to be unrestricted to attain an advancement that will put them on a par with other technically advanced nations of the world'.^[545]

Independence mattered to contemporaries because it represented a chance to do something different. For R. Kaminyoge Mwanjisi, Publicity Secretary of Tanganyika's nationalist party TANU, in a speech delivered on a visit to Kilwa in southern Tanganyika in 1958, ‘[t]he freedom which we demand is not simply that of escaping the shame of being ruled'. Independence meant the ability to do practical things which would make life better for the citizens of the new state. ‘The task of getting water in Tanganyika is not the task of the British Government, they are not hurt by it', he said. To solve this problem required an independent Government which ‘will take steps to put the problems of the citizens first'. The reason that it would take these steps was that it would be held accountable by its citizens in a way that a colonial government would not, for, he continued, ‘[t]he people will say to their government: “we have paid our taxes, you must remove our problems”'.^[546]

8.3