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Prof. S. Charusheela: The Westphalian State in Liberal-Democratic Imagination of the UN Charter: A Decolonial Feminist Perspective

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ABSTRACT:

A specific imagination of the Treaty of Westphalia (1648) shaped the post-World War II architecture of international relations through the UN Charter. This framework, developed with a primarily Euro-American focus in the immediate aftermath of WW2, anchored the approach used for decolonization and independence as nations across the globe began to carve their own paths to economic and political autonomy in Asia and Africa.  While historians have rightly pointed out the disjuncture between the imagination and reality of Westphalia, this paper focuses more specifically on the imagination of Democracy, and especially of representative democracy anchored in the institutions and practices of ‘good’ Nation-States. These institutions and practices at national and global levels were deemed capable of addressing issues ranging from religious tolerance to minority rights through a combination of democratic processes and constitutional protections within Nation-States, alongside checks and balances provided by the UN Charter (1945) and Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948).

What went wrong? Today, country after country is poised on either having elected, or ready to elect authoritarian majoritarian ethno-national rulers and parties. While many compelling analyses highlight the limits of the global order in terms of capitalism, class, media, and so on, in this paper I add to this conversation by suggesting that this outcome is a dialectical unfolding of a feature in-built in concepts of democracy that are built around the liberal imagination. More particularly, it is the specific liberal construction of equality rendered as one person one vote, based on citizenship anchored in birth-based forms of belonging to a Nation-State, that unfolds as a majoritarian project that ends up with ethno-nationalism. The paper uses examples from the first state to be established under this Charter with the aim of addressing past grievances of the holocaust (Israel), along with examples from both “Eastern” cultures (Hindutva in India), and “Western” ones (USA), to make its case.

A specific, though hardly accidental or incidental aspect of this dialectic is reproductive control. Female bodies in the form of wombs that produce the correct or wrong mix and volume of citizens remains a target of this unfolding imagination.  We can see this in both the anxieties about anchor babies or the pressure on women via pro-natalist policies to secure the future of the nation by having more babies.  States with “good feminist policies” about social safety nets are not exempt from this. Thus one question we face as feminist economists is about our over-reliance on the Nation-State to enact feminist policies. We must ask for whom these policies are, which groups of women benefit and which are forgotten or deemed acceptable “collateral damage” when our field prioritizes advocacy to and presence in, this type of democratic state as our feminist politics.

 

BIO:

S. Charusheela (Charu) is a Professor in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences, University of Washington Bothell.  She received her Ph.D. in Economics at UMASS Amherst. She has served as Editor of Rethinking Marxism, served two terms as an elected member of the Governing Board of the Cultural Studies Association (US), and twice served as an elected board member for the International Association for Feminist Economics (IAFFE).


Picture sourced from: https://charusheela.org/

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