16 - Liberté sans Frontières, French Humanitarianism, and the Neoliberal Critique of Third Worldism

Summary

In his 1978–9 lectures on The Birth of Biopolitics, Michel Foucault highlighted the prevalence of what he described as “state phobia.” This state phobia held two important elements: first, the belief that the state possesses an inherent power of expansion in relation to civil society; and, second, the belief in a continuity between various state forms – the welfare state and the totalitarian state for instance. While Foucault nominated the Austrian neoliberals and Soviet dissidents as important vectors of this state phobia, this chapter assesses another factor that Foucault does not mention: the new generation of activist humanitarian organizations (with whom Foucault was closely aligned) which, throughout the 1970s and 1980s, challenged the principle of national sovereignty. In opposition to the anti-colonial nationalism of the previous decade, figures like Bernard Kouchner, and members of Médecins sans Frontières spin-off Liberté sans Frontières, launched an attack on the anti-colonial privileging of sovereignty over individual rights. Moreover, they developed a critique of Third Worldism that rested on the assimilation of the postcolonial state to the paradigm of “totalitarianism”; postcolonial states were portrayed not as weak states subjected to continuing neocolonial exploitation but as excessively strong states whose power was inadequately limited by human rights.