Michelle Carmody
>Humanitarian Colonialism
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Shadi Ghadirian
Michelle Carmody @ Overland explores the relationship between liberalism and human rights.
A couple of months ago I went on a date with a man from France. As we were talking, I thought to myself, ‘Avoid the burqa conversation, Michelle, avoid the burqa conversation.’ I must have jinxed myself because then, all of a sudden, we were having it: the burqa conversation.
His argument went something like this. The French – lovers of liberty and enlightened crusaders of secularism – think it better to have fifty people prevented from practising their religion than one woman oppressed by the burqa that said religion forces her to wear.
This, more or less, is the reasoning invoked time and time again to legitimate not just the banning of the veil but other interventions into the mysterious space of the Other. Francis Fukuyama spoke too soon when he declared that the global triumph of liberal market-based democracy signalled the ‘end of history’. Spaces of savagery remain on the periphery of the market economy and history continues to tell the tale of attempted conversions of their inhabitants into good liberal subjects.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )In this process, contemporary forms of liberalism engage in a kind of humanitarian colonialism whereby the imposition of a new social or cultural structure is legitimised though a discourse of freedom – one of the ‘highest aspiration[s] of the common people’, according to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The practice is evident in phenomena as diverse as the continued military presence in Iraq and Afghanistan, the banning of the burqa in France and elsewhere, and the intervention in the Northern Territory here in Australia. In all of these cases, freedom from the oppression of culture and tradition gone wild is given as the raison d’être of the action. The civilising mission, mark II.
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