Abstract
Daniel Maul, Human Rights, Development and Decolonization: The International Labour Organization, 1940–1970; Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2012; xviii + 416 pp.; £70.00 hbk. ISBN 9789221291910.
Historians are increasingly interested in global and transnational histories of the contemporary world. The requirement to analyse the interlocking processes associated with twentieth century globalization has necessitated greater scrutiny of the institutions of global governance. Works by Akira Iriye and Mark Mazower stress the significance of such structures and the potential for historians to analyse the United Nations and its agencies in a manner that is distinct from the diplomatic historian or the political scientist. Particularly useful elements within this emerging historiography are works teasing out the ideological underpinnings of forms of ‘world government’. Understanding the paradoxes, tensions, ambiguities and contradictions implicit at such locations is proving particularly fruitful terrain for those wishing to construct ‘new global history’. Postwar international institutions were certainly key sites in spreading globalizing discourses, but they were also locations where such discourses were negotiated, debated and contested.
The turn towards global history is raising important questions, not least concerning the nature and appropriate periodization of globalization, alongside understanding continuities and changes in the power and boundaries of nation states. However, robust empirical work in this field is only just emerging. Daniel Maul’s excellent work on the International Labour Organization (ILO), which is grounded in substantial archival research, is a particularly welcome contribution.
As Maul makes clear, the ILO is a useful starting point for exploring postwar decolonization, human rights and development discourses. It provided a forum for the voices of former colonial states, took a role as a ‘standards setter’ and became a research centre for social issues. Subsequently, the ILO was both a platform and crucial protagonist of policies and programmes relating to social rights and development. Investigating the ILO thus permits Maul to discuss the capacities and limitations of international agencies to act, assess the ways in which newly emerging post-colonial nations could both challenge and sustain such agencies, and chart how an agency can adapt over time to vastly changing global economic, social and political contexts.
The work has a chronological structure centering on three distinctive eras for the ILO. After briefly outlining the history of the body prior to the Second World War, the first substantial section examines the period between 1940 and 1947. Maul argues that this witnessed the ILO at its most optimistic. The Declaration of Philadelphia in 1944 significantly expanded the ILO’s horizons and placed a set of universal rights at the heart of its agenda. The second part of the book covers the period between 1948 and 1960. During this time, the first wave of decolonization and the onset of the Cold War provided the ILO with an entirely new set of challenges. Both the new former colonies and the ILO shifted concentration towards development. However, such a trajectory was not straightforward. A commitment to the universalist set of rights underpinning the ILO’s vision of modernization increasingly conflicted with varied development agendas. Often the need for rapid economic advancement appeared to trump more individualistic notions of rights. Initiatives like the Technical Assistance Programme thus failed to gain purchase within Africa in particular. The third part of the book examines the 1960s and 1970s. Continued decolonization meant the majority of the ILO’s membership now came from developing nations. Subsequently the ILO had to grapple with the greater politicization of new members eager to articulate a North–South global divide. Maul demonstrates that impressive management and leadership by the ILO’s Secretariat sustained the organization despite engagement with numerous controversial issues, most notably in responding to the apartheid politics of South Africa. The period also witnessed the creation of significant development programmes such as the World Employment Programme. The ILO therefore ended the 1970s as an important agency in technical assistance for development. This led to a number of tangible achievements, yet these were sustained in part through a diminished emphasis on universal rights that had previously been at the heart of its agenda.
Maul’s work is a serious and important survey of the ILO. Where it excels is in discussing the ambiguous meanings of development and social rights and analysing the interplay between international agencies and developing nation state. His command of details relating to the internal politics of the ILO is very impressive. The work is highly ambitious and exceptionally well researched. One of its most striking features is the colossal range of the ILO’s activities that Maul manages to convey successfully through judicious use of the twin themes of development and human rights. Given the numerous strengths within Maul’s work, it is a shame that the work is not quite so explicit in addressing some of the issues of the emerging historiography on human rights in particular. Such empirical work could have provided a robust empirical testing ground for some of the broader and intellectual debates surrounding the politics of rights. If social rights were, to some extent, having a reduced emphasis through the 1970s in favour of development what does this show about the narrative stressing that decade’s significance in the evolution of rights offered by Moyn? Such a question reflects the work’s tendency towards offering an institutional history of the ILO. Whilst Maul never loses sight of the broader framework, the work might have more sharply explained the significance of the ILO’s negotiations on rights and development and how these contrasted with other global institutions.
Maul’s work also raises questions about periods not covered within his text. The work hints at the even greater challenges facing the ILO with the increased pace of globalization and the onset of neoliberalism at the end of the twentieth century. As development took on a discourse of freedom, which might be associated with the spread of neoliberalism, it would be interesting to know more about how the ILO responded. Given the vast ground covered within the book and its focus on the processes and outcomes of decolonization it is understandable that such issues are not embraced. However, it is a shame that the volume ends with little comment on an era that potentially witnessed a reconfiguration of the global order that was as significant as that which took place in the immediate postwar period. Nonetheless, in skilfully teasing out the contradictions and tensions between rights and development, piecing together a complex analysis through a vast level of highly critical and detailed research, and exploring the interplay between international institutions and varied nation states, Maul’s book makes a very substantial and interesting contribution to an emerging field.