Información sobre uso y utilidad de medicamentos

The quest for self-government in America has a long history, both in the North and in Latin America. For us, contemporary witnesses of the power of the United States, it can be easy to lose sight of the fact that there was a time in which the US was a colony of the British Empire. A war for independence was fought in North America by the second half of the 18th

century, more than a decade before the French Revolution took place. The Declaration of Independence of 1776 sanctioned the end of the rule of the

45 _{Tierney, The Idea of Natural Rights, 280-281.} 46 _{Ibid., 285.}

47 _{Anghie, “Colonial Origins,” 325.}

48 _{On the contribution of de las Casas to the creation of a modern theory of}

universal natural rights see Tierney, The Idea of Natural Rights, 273.

49 _{Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University}

Chapter Five 156

British and proclaimed the rights of the citizens of the former colonies.50

This veritable bill of rights fulfiled the function of putting into evidence the lack of legitimacy of the subjection of the colonies to imperial rule and, at the same time, it was one of the constitutional pillars for the new republican political organisation.

The Declaration of Independence justifies the struggle for liberation from the British Empire. It responds to a question the Declaration poses to itself about why it is necessary for the colonies to break apart from the British crown. After stating the validity of the universal laws of nature, the Declaration advances according to a clear structure. It enumerates the natural rights to which the inhabitants of the colonies were entitled, then narrates some historical events in which these rights had been violated, and finally reaches the conclusion according to which emancipation from Britain was necessary. The declaration arrives to the same inference later when it considers the right to rebellion against tyranny. Stating the principle according to which governments are established in order to guarantee the principles of natural law, the Declaration points that should they fail to do so, a new right emerges: that of rebelling against the ruler that betrays these principles and of throwing off “such government, and to replace it by a new one”. After making a long list of the historical “abuses and usurpations” committed by the King of Great Britain, whose regime is described as one of “absolute despotism” emancipation becomes an incontestable duty and a right. In this sense, the abuses committed against the natural rights of the colonies and their inhabitants operate as a justification for the liberation from the empire, while independence itself becomes a right.

The proclamation of rights begins with the motto “all men are created equal”, which puts equality as the principle that guides the relation between the British and the inhabitants of the colonies, giving the latter the same status. In this context the term “all” has a meaning that is different to that it usually has in the theory of natural law when thinking about the organisation of society. “All” does not mean here a category encompassing each one of those individuals belonging to a particular state to a national political organisation. It alludes instead to a world jurisdiction, as equality should be predicated beyond Europe to those who

50 _{The Declaration of Independence enumerated the rights the British should not}

have alienated from the inhabitants of the colonies and proclaimed the right to emancipation. A further declaration of rights, the “Bill of Rights”, was introduced in 1789 as amendments to the Constitution of 1787.

Imperialism and Decolonization as Scenarios of Human Rights History 157

are not Europeans. The Declaration continues with a reference to “the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” in which liberty means the collective right that had been historical eroded in the life of the colonies under tyranny. The right to liberty also carries its long awaited consequences, that is, emancipation and the capacity to freely decide on the destiny of the former colonies.

This reading of the role of the rights proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence has been underestimated in the interpretations made through the prism of the European theory of human rights. From a Eurocentric perspective, rights are mainly understood as paradigms on which the bourgeois society was modelled, and as regulators of the relationship between society and the state. This is the case with Habermas’ comparison between the Declaration of Independence and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man. Habermas initially accertains that these two manifestos have different meanings derived from their distinct teleology: while the rights in the Declaration of Independence justify the emancipation from the British empire, in the French Declaration they operate as a legitimisation of the overthrowing of the ancient regime.

Nevertheless, Habermas sidelines a historical approach to these events and ops for an abstract perspective that he calls “immannent”. Focused on the role played by natural law in the wake of bourgeois revolutions, Habermas loses sight of the stark difference between the rationale of the US and the French Declarations. In this way, his reflection on the Declaration of Independence remains within the initial and overriding context of his concern for the role natural law in the constitution of the relationships between individuals and the state. Ultimately, for Habermas, the American and the French Declarations are just instances of the same species or “two different constructions of the Natural law of bourgeois society”.51 _{Althought the War of Independence is a bourgeois revolution}

by the nature of the new political and economic order it creates, the Revolution of Independence is first of all an anti-imperial enterprise. As Habermas is concerned mainly with the definition of the foundations of the bourgeois society, and with the events that occured within the national borders of the European nation-states, he does not situate his interpretation of the Declaration of Independence in the horizon of understanding of the world system the modern world at large. Thus, Habermas puts aside the matter of the contribution of natural law to the shaping of the relations

Imperialism and Decolonization as Scenarios of Human Rights History 159

1815 by the emancipated federal provinces contained Bills of Rights that included rights that had been proclaimed a few years before in the US and French declarations. This was the case in the Second Section of the Constitution of the Federal State of Antioquia of 1812 on “The Rights of the Man in Society”, which began by stating:

God has equally conceded to men certain natural rights, essential and imprescriptible, like those to defend and keep their lives, acquire, enjoy and protect their properties, seek and obtain their security and happiness. These rights are summarised in four principles, namely: legal freedom and equality, security and property.52

In a new series of successful political moves for emancipation in South America, the doctrine of rights proclaimed by the Declaration of Independence and the French Declaration provided a discourse that channeled the popular discontent and contributed to justify the revolutions of independence throughout the continent. At the same time, the doctrine of rights supplied some of the principles that should be abided for the new polities to be feasible and democratic. In these circumstances, again, natural law and rights operated as a utopian force and helped to bring to an end centuries of imperialism. In short, the first developments of the modern theory and praxis of human rights are not to be found in the history of the bourgeois revolutions in European. Rather, they are inscribed within the historical impulse for emancipation and self- determination incarnated by Las Casas, the wars of independence in the United States and throughout America, and in the rights they declared and adopted in their national constitutions.53

5. Decolonisation and the Right to Self-Determination