6 - Cutting Out the Ulcer and Washing Away the Incubus of the Past

Summary

This chapter analyzes the intersection of decolonization, the partitions of Germany, British India, and Palestine in the 1940s, and the so-called human rights revolution. It does so by reconstructing the discussion about the morality and efficacy of population “transfer” in the 1930s, because at the time it became ineluctably associated with partition and was justified in terms of modernity and preventing ethnic civil wars. It became related to the question of human rights in the early 1940s. Academic or quasi-academic policy analysts and advocates who advised major organizations and/or states not only delivered the justifications employed by governments as they negotiated a distinctive phase of decolonization and its relationship to evolving human rights norms: the end of Nazi empire in Europe and dissolution of British imperial control in the Middle East and South Asia. They also made the case for the foundational violence of the new order in which we live today. The consensus linking partition, population transfer, and human rights emerged in a highly Eurocentric and historically specific context: that of debate around the fate of German minorities in Central and Eastern Europe, and Zionist aspirations in Palestine.