60 years after the UN Convention - Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation

264 development dialogue december 2008 – revisiting the heart of darkness
The arguments exchanged between the philosopher Ginés de Sepúlveda
and the Dominican padre and bishop Bartholomé de Las Casas at
the Spanish court in Valladolid in 1550 over the annihilating eff ects
of the Conquista on the South American population marks the fi nal
entry into what might be termed European modernity in the wake of
the fi rst stages of colonial-imperialist expansion some 500 years ago.
The legal-philosophical exchange over the fate of South America’s
indigenous Indian people showed that the emerging era of enlightenment
(considered emancipatory in substance and nature), was at the
same time nonetheless infected by a racial hierarchy. Since then the
people of this world have been structured according to a pyramid
model – with the most ‘civilised’ European nations and their citizens
at the top. According to Las Casas, Sepúlveda’s humanist opponent,
South American Indians deserved to be spared forced labour in the
mines. Instead, Las Casas suggested using negro slaves from Africa,
since they were in his view inferior to Indians. What was widely celebrated
as an achievement – and still is today at times – is revealed at a
closer look as merely another ideological articulation of the civilising
mission abused for centuries to follow. 2 Since then this view has been
modifi ed, but it survives as an integral part of the concept of European
modernity and rationality that emerged as a hegemonic paradigm
with the era of enlightenment. 3
The abolitionist views so vehemently advocated by the French aristocrat
and citoyen, the Marquis de Condorcet (in 1794 himself a victim
of the guillotine), reinforced at the same time a mystifi cation of
progress similar to that already advocated by Las Casas, which appealed
to a bourgeois humanism with all its inherent discriminations.
His linear evolutionism represented absolute belief in progress and
development within a hierarchical worldview, which considered European
nations and people to be the top of the pyramid. All other
people, while recognised as human beings, had to be uplifted to this
level in the course of the civilising mission – or had to disappear. An
advocate of the abolition of slavery, he was nevertheless caught in a
mindset that considered emancipation of fellow human beings as synonymous
with the domestication of the ‘savage’, thus emulating the
French and Anglo-Americans, considered the most civilised human
2 See, on the debate itself as well as the fundamental consequences it had, Hanke (1959),
Hernandez (undated), Kristeva (1991) and Todorov (1984).
3 Confronted with the horror of the Nazi regime, Max Horkheimer and Theodor W.
Adorno, as the most prominent protagonists of Critical Theory and the Frankfurt
School of Thought, refl ected most sensibly on this in their ‘Dialektik der Aufklärung’
(Dialectic of the Englightenment), fi rst published during the 1940s in Amsterdam; for an
English version see Adorno and Horkheimer (1997).