This chapter features a broad spectrum of voices of the 1960s which all, if to varying degrees, used the normative framework of human rights in their growing criticisms of global inequalities: from pan-Africanists to the 1960s Popes to development economist Barbara Ward to other key figures in the UN community of ideas. Building upon new research on the global history of human rights, the chapter demonstrates that human rights were deployed to criticize global material inequality; that their protagonists were concerned with distributive justice; and that it was a long quest to defend economic and social human rights. Global inequalities, including those pertaining to racism and empire, were increasingly unjustifiable – to some extent in the very light of the growing legitimacy of human rights. It was a decade in which international economic and social human rights acquired a hitherto unparalleled legitimacy with the 1966 International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. The chapter sheds new light on figures such as Barbara Ward, the 1960s Popes, Ralph Bunche, and UNESCO official Malcolm Adiseshiah.

This chapter focuses on the history of human rights thinking mainly in the aftermath of the founding of the United Nations. It focuses primarily on international jurist Hersch Lauterpacht and secondarily on political scientist Arthur Holcombe. Whereas the 1948 UDHR has received much attention in human rights historiography, the chapter tells a story less told of how key intellectuals at the time grappled with international economic and social human rights. Little studied in the scholarly literature that have mainly focused on Lauterpacht’s legacy in inventing the legal concept of “crimes against humanity,” the chapter argues that his thinking on the international protection of human rights in 1950 was a nuanced, qualified, and careful, yet uncompromising defense of economic and social rights. Ultimately, while Lauterpacht’s defense of human rights mainly relied on the all-important negative principle of safeguarding individuals against the state – a protection from evil and harm that the contemporary order had blatantly failed to secure in the case of the Holocaust – it also entailed a more positive principle of facilitating human flourishing.

Whereas political and intellectual debates about the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights have received considerable scholarly attention, the intellectual history of international economic and social human rights in the 1950s remains an understudied topic. This chapter investigates this history, zooming in upon Ralph Bunche, Gunnar Myrdal, and Moses Moskowitz, and mapping their main arguments in favor of economic and social human rights. Within the domineering horizon of the global Cold War, they argued in favor of internationalizing economic and social human rights, even if their chances of success, admittedly, looked very slim. It was a human rights advocacy that included a criticism of material inequality. This advocacy flowed from several actors in various parts of the UN – from Bunche’s and Myrdal’s UN leadership positions preoccupied, respectively, with political conflicts and decolonization and economic development, to Moskowitz representing the Jewish minority at the UN and dedicated solely to human rights advocacy. Little noted in the scholarly literature, economic, and social human rights had some degree of salience within the burgeoning discourses on development too.

This chapter nuances the widespread view that human rights became the world’s global morality in the post–Cold War era. Investigating examples from international human rights law and intellectual history, it demonstrates that economic and social human rights did not come to enjoy the same status as civil and political rights. The mid-1970s to the 1980s was a period of frustration for economic and social human rights. Within a few years, hopes for a more egalitarian international world order with international obligations to promote economic and social human rights were shattered. Major factors were the dynamics of postcolonialism, the global Cold War and state power logics, and neoliberalism. Partly as a testimony to this, intellectuals such as Amartya Sen were concerned with basic rights. The post–Global Cold War period was marked by a premature sentiment of human rights triumphalism, though there were important efforts to strengthen economic and social human rights. As witnessed from the backlashes against these rights in the twenty-first century, their wider legitimacy and influence has remained much weaker than their advocates have hoped for.

This chapter analyzes the development of discourses on human rights and on inequality from 1962 until 1974 through the lens of Manouchehr Ganji, an Iranian human rights scholar and UN Special Rapporteur. Where other scholars have examined Ganji’s report The Widening Gap from 1973 with a key focus upon its impact within the UN, this chapter contextualizes the report in three novel ways, bringing in his 1962 doctoral dissertation not previously studied in the research literature; connecting it to how inequality became a major theme in the late 1960s and early 1970s broadly across development discourse, and to how human rights increasingly were deployed to denounce inequality; and, finally, by discussing these developments with regard to recent discussions of the historical relationships between human rights, inequality, and neoliberalism. Crucially, beyond the singularity of the one individual studied most in this chapter stands a much more general and pertinent point: The human rights project in 1973 was an ambitious anti-inequality project. It was a structural approach to human rights, aiming at undoing deeper within- and between-nation inequalities.

This chapter analyzes discourses on universal economic and social human rights and social democracy in connection with intellectuals discussing the American and British war aims of World War II. It was an age of major societal transformations: the socialization of work due to industrial capitalism; experiences of authoritarian ideologies emerging out of, inter alia, extreme inequality; and nascent uproars against racism and imperialism. Human rights were part of moral discourses on equality and social justice in the aftermath of the Great Depression and critiques of laissez-faire capitalism. The chapter details how Ralph Bunche and George Herbert Wells championed a vision of social democracy and human rights. Bunche and Wells intervened in wartime when many intellectuals across the political and religious spectrum would write of human rights. Key intellectual actors increasingly referred to a new political “space” of “the world,” and some were redefining “democracy” as a “world” and a “social” democracy. Revisiting their thinking allows for a more detailed reconstruction of their argumentation, including on how, specifically, they defended economic and social human rights.

Why do most migrant workers still lack access to urban public services despite national directives to incorporate them into cities, reported worker shortages, and ongoing labor unrest? How do policies said to expand workers’ rights end up undermining their claims to benefits owed to them? This opening chapter maps out the challenge of urbanization as development and situates the concept of political atomization and the main findings of this book in the larger context of inequality and authoritarian distribution. The concept of political atomization helps us understand four phenomena better: how authoritarian regimes exercise social control beyond coercion, why the perceived exchange of promised services for loyalty bolsters authoritarian resilience, how public service provision works without elections, and why there have been new gradations of second-class citizenship and structural inequality in China. To show how political atomization works, this book tracks the dynamics and consequences of the process from the state’s perspective through migrants’ points of view. This book uncovers emergent and evolving sources of embedded inequality, social control, and everyday marginalization in China.

This chapter examines the evolution of Association Agreements after the Single European Act and before the failed Constitutional Treaty. It begins by analysing the case-law on Association Agreements and it shows how the Court shaped an extensive system of rights for migrants in light of the role they played in the EU project of growth. This approach of the Court was not well received. Rather, Member States tried to restrict rights of migrant workers in Association Agreements concluded during this period precisely with the purpose of avoiding the transposition of the relevant case-law. The chapter also examines the clauses in enlargement and association with European developed countries, where the extension of rights to migrants was easily accepted.

This chapter analyses the current framework regulating migration from third countries. It is only in this period that the relevant secondary law was fully formed. The analysis reveals the extensive attribution of rights to those TCN migrants the EU most needs, that is, those who are considered crucial for the EU development project. In parallel, economic safeguards of different kind appear in the system to ensure that TCN migration can in no way pose risks to the EU project. Next to the legislative framework, the examination of the case-law of the Court highlights the consolidation of social objectives by an emphasis on Charter rights in review of national measures transposing secondary law. In this chapter, the investigation further shows the complete elimination of migrants’ rights from agreements concluded by the EU with third countries.

This concluding chapter first summarizes the findings of the main investigation and suggests that the problem behind the new objective of sustainable migration lies not so much in the effort to align migration with economic and social demands. This has after all been a constant feature of EU law as distilled from the historical investigation. Rather, the problem lies in the way the economic and social objectives of the EU are perceived by different actors. The chapter analyses the limitations that exist in the way EU law has historically aligned migrants’ rights to the economic and social objectives of primary law and reflects on what an EU sustainable migration can and cannot mean for the rights of migrants. Essentially, the analysis highlights that structural features of the EU legal order set very clear limits in attempts to envision an EU sustainable migration law. Finally, the chapter also presents a realistic vision of what an EU sustainable migration law could mean if the way economic and social objectives are considered was redirected and grounded on the current acquis.

This chapter addresses the special arrangements made to regulate migration from specific third countries in the period before the Single European Act. First, it will be shown how social and economic objectives, paired with favourable economic circumstances, laid the foundation for the extensive protection of Turkish workers under the EEC–Turkey Association Agreement. Following this, the analysis shows how economic cooperation with specific countries that were crucial for supplying migrant labour led to the attribution of rights to third-country nationals despite their exclusion from primary and secondary law. Finally, the chapter discusses enlargement processes and investigates how accession treaties concluded during this period were framed in light of ensuring the promotion of economic objectives, while limiting migration rights for nationals of acceding states. The analysis reveals the constant attempts by EU institutions to ensure that migration policy is aligned with the objectives of growth and progress, and thereby with the economic and social pillars of sustainability.

Corporatism refers to the tradition of constitutional theories that argue that self-organized bodies, such as universities, churches, or labour unions, are independent and important components of a constitutional order. While in the twentieth-century corporatism became associated primarily with economic actors, a central question in corporatist theory was the broader constitutional status of non-state associations and organizations that had their own political powers to govern their members and engage in quasi-legislative activity. In arguing for the independent legitimacy of such diverse corporate actors, proponents of corporatism were united in criticizing more liberal visions of constitutionalism for its abstraction and formalism. Many corporatist theorists thus advocated a sort of societal constitutionalism, where constitutional norms are embodied in diverse institutions that are more proximate to individuals than the state – ranging from major professional and economic associations to a variety of civil society groups. This chapter analyses corporatism both as a tradition in constitutional theory and as an empirical phenomenon that arose in the interwar and post-war periods. It argues that corporatist ideas can contribute to a theory of democratic constitutionalism that emphasizes the importance of organized collective power, and not just the problem of regulating state coercion or distributing formal rights.

Constitutions are, above all, a compact among equals: they represent a contract that aims to include everyone, on an equal footing. This fact is explicitly reflected in a majority of constitutions, which appear openly committed to a principle of legal equality. The problem is that, from its very origins, this egalitarian constitutional ideal encountered enormous difficulties that prevented it from becoming ae reality in practice. Almost every area covered by the equality principle - whether we refer to the rights of racial, sexual or ethnic minorities, or to the workers’ rights – was transformed into a space for legal and political dispute. This chapter explores a few of those “disputed territories”, including conflicts around social rights; gender inequality; and indigenous rights. In this way, this text pays attention to the continuous, unfinished battle between the constitutional ideal of equality and a political practice systematically oriented to defy it.

This chapter begins an analysis of why some constitutional systems have begun again to show militaristic emphases. It argues that in some cases this is to due to the fact that, since the 1980s, one part of the system of world law constructed after 1945 – namely the internal welfare dimension – has been weakened. This is assessed as part of the global background in constitution-making processes that commenced in the 1980s. The chapter considers a range of cases where constitutions have begun to malfunction with military consequences. It divides these cases into constitutions marked by vertical militarization (Russia, Brazil) and constitutions marked by lateral militarization. It links these developments to weakness in social integration processes under different constitutions.

This chapter dismantles the long-standing narrative that social rights only emerged after civil and political rights, as a response to socialist critiques of liberalism. The foundations for such rights extend back to medieval Christian laws governing charity. It was the economic theories of the eighteenth century that secularized justifications for the “rights” of the neediest. French revolutionaries adopted these arguments, linking social rights to principles of reciprocity and duties, but they fought over who had the duty to finance them: the state (through taxes) or civil society (through markets and charity). As a result of these struggles, social rights became associated with “terror” and were abandoned. Meanwhile, the Catholic Church advanced its own understanding of social rights, grounded in the mutual obligations of humans in society (as opposed to the perceived individualism of the revolutionary declarations). These religious doctrines, together with certain strands of liberalism and socialism, informed conversations around social rights throughout the nineteenth century.

This chapter explains different definitions of citizenship including citizenship as status, as rights, as participation, and as identity. It highlights key immigration laws and periods of immigrant inclusion and exclusion. The chapter also presents basic data on demographic change through American political history.