Liberal Ideals and the Politics of Decolonisation by H Kumarasingham

Author:H Kumarasingham [Kumarasingham, H]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780367513139
Google: XDlmzQEACAAJ
Goodreads: 52577657
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2020-07-02T00:00:00+00:00

Liberalism?

However, the dispute proved unfortunate for Smuts in several ways. First, he had shown himself to be a poor tactician. He was responsible for South Africa’s case being ‘badly represented’;84 underestimated the Indians; did not listen to advice; and was ‘completely out of his element’ in the General Assembly.85 He had witnessed but not heeded the humanitarian aspect of the 1945 San Francisco conference which established the UN, and dismissed the Assembly’s bark as harmless, thinking his personal prestige and his country’s international standing would protect the Union from serious criticism.86 Not so. It was a sorry performance.

Second, in terms of domestic politics it was a considerable setback, as the outcome provided a good deal of ammunition for his political opponents. Smuts tried to counter this by making some very modest reforms to South Africa’s racial laws. But this failed to have the desired effect and his United Party was deemed to have lost an important by-election ‘mainly because of Smuts’s alleged liberal attitude towards Indians’.87 The 1948 general election ushered in a long period of Nationalist rule and, with it, the application of the system of racial apartheid and South Africa’s growing international isolation.

Third, the UN defeat was in effect also a defeat for the Smuts version of liberal internationalism, with its emphasis on the values of western Christian civilisation and white supremacy. Evidently, this was no longer internationally acceptable. Smuts and his ideas had become ‘an anachronism’.88 And Britain, by putting too much faith in Smuts and effectively becoming South Africa’s cheerleader, failed to uphold liberal values and ideals.

But although it was not then apparent, Britain had set in motion its helter-skelter withdrawal from empire. As Lord Beloff put it, ‘Once the Indian Empire was given up there seemed little point in hanging on to the remainder. If there was threat of trouble, there was no point at all.’89 The ‘modern creed’90 of liberal democracy was a powerful spur to the process, as was the CO’s ‘very liberal’ attitude to independence and the arrival in the CO of a post-war generation of idealistic and slightly ‘pink’ officials who positively looked forward to dismantling the empire.91

Furthermore, the 1946 dispute contributed to a rather different kind of liberalism being introduced onto the international stage. For in effect the UN had spoken out in favour of a liberal interpretation of Article 2.7 and, more generally, put racial discrimination of a formal kind on the international agenda. This proved to be the thin end of a wedge into the walls of state exclusivity. For one of the characteristics of the second half of the twentieth century was the gradually widening attention the international community paid to how states treated their citizens – which was in marked contrast to the practice of the previous 50 years. Thus in 1948 the UN adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The Declaration had no legal force. And it was the product of the events of the Second World War, not the Indian-South African dispute. But

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