A/HRC/50/60 21. The mandate system reproduced colonial hierarchies and presented economic and cultural development as equating to a linear process that had been followed by European States, which non-European societies were required to reproduce in order to achieve development.33 When economic development and human welfare conflicted in the mandate territories, Eurocentric development goals were usually prioritized. 34 So-called development of the mandate territories advanced European models of progress at the expense of indigenous cultural, political and economic systems. 22. Both the mandate system and the United Nations system for Non-Self-Governing Territories laid the groundwork for the contemporary international development framework. Whereas explicitly racist discourses have largely been abandoned, notions of the economic, political, social and cultural “backwardness” of formerly colonized peoples in the “developing” world have persisted. Indeed, the 1949 speech of Harry Truman, then President of the United States of America, considered to be the inaugural address of the age of development, contrasted the poverty and “backwardness” of the former colonial territories against the wealth and technological advancement of the “developed” world and promised that the “developed” world’s wealth would be generously shared through the framework of development. Entirely absent from that speech and the development apparatus it launched was any meaningful recognition of the centuries of colonial exploitation that were central to the immiseration of formerly colonized peoples, or how that exploitation had enabled the prosperity of imperial nations. 23. Following the Second World War, the modern development framework was set in motion, including the creation of the Bretton Woods institutions. Over the course of the twentieth century, the Bretton Woods institutions advanced neoclassical and neoliberal economic prescriptions, eventually congealing in the so-called “Washington Consensus”, an approach to economic development that demanded “outward orientation and free-market capitalism”, 35 which often conditioned aid on “developing” countries meeting those demands.36 24. Although the dominant international rhetoric promised a new, universalized equality between all States and peoples, the postcolonial international economic order preserved colonial and racial inequality. “Underdeveloped” nations – overwhelmingly States in Africa, Asia and Latin America – challenged what they identified as a racialized, neocolonial economic system through forums at the United Nations. In 1960, the General Assembly adopted the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples, in which Member States affirmed that “the continued existence of colonialism prevents the development of international economic co-operation [and] impedes the social, cultural and economic development of dependent peoples”.37 The Declaration on Permanent Sovereignty over Natural Resources followed in 1962.38 Less than three years later, in the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, Member States explicitly recognized the relationship between colonialism and racial discrimination. 39 25. In 1966, the then Minister for Foreign Affairs of Senegal, Doudou Thiam, proposed the establishment of the “right to development”,40 which he defined as “right of formerly colonial countries to recover the losses suffered from the depredations of colonial conquest 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 Antony Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law (Cambridge, United Kingdom, Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 145. Ibid., pp. 156–175. A/HRC/38/33, para. 4, quoting J. Williamson (ed.), “What Washington means by policy reform”, in Latin American Adjustment: How Much has Happened? (1990). A/65/260, paras. 9–11. General Assembly resolution 1514 (XV), preamble. General Assembly resolution 1803 (XVII). See General Assembly resolutions 18/1904, preamble, and 2106 (XX), preamble. Daniel J. Whelan, “‘Under the aegis of man’: The right to development and the origins of the New International Economic Order”, Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development, vol. 6, No. 1 (Spring 2015), pp. 93–94. 7