The insurmountable contradictions of liberalism: human rights and the rights of peoples in the geoculture of the modern world-system.

Abstract

The political project of nineteenth-century liberalism for the core countries of the capitalist world-economy was to tame the dangerous classes by offering a triple program of rational reform: the suffrage, the welfare state, and national identity. It followed that any "rights of peoples" were reserved to a very few specific peoples, and were not at all the rights of all the other peoples. Indeed to grant "barbarians" their rights as peoples was thought to result in practice in the denial of the "human rights" of their peoples. The two sets of rights were therefore placed in the nineteenth century in direct conflict one with the other. There was no way the world could have both.