The "Settler-Colonial Caucus" at the UN
The "Settler-Colonial Caucus" at the UN
Craig Mokhiber describes the diplomatic grouping at the UN called the WEOG
I came across an interesting segment in an interview Katie Harper did with former UN human rights official Craig Mokhiber, who is an “expert in international human rights law, policy, and methodology.” I’d be interested in hearing whether you agree, and if not, what counterarguments you have.
Mokhiber describes an article he wrote in Foreign Policy in Focus titled “WEOG: The UN’s Settler - Colonial Bloc” which he describes countries like the US and Canada belonging to.
WEOG: Western European and Others Group (Wikipedia)
Summary:
In the US, “International relations” was formerly called “race relations.”
Foreign Affairs — the leading US international relations journal — used to be called the Journal of Race Development.
It has justified itself as Anti-Soviet/Communist, or “Western Democracies” but this is belied by its membership.
This “Mainline” group of WEOG countries is harming human rights by opposing human rights and indigenous rights, and undermining international law.
I’ve created a rough transcript of the video:
Video Transcript:
Katie Harper: I want to ask you about another article that you wrote at Foreign Policy in Focus. It is called WEOG, the UN Settler Colonial block a UN grouping, anchored by the Anglo countries, Israel, and European States wields disproportionate power to undermine human rights and international law.
So tell us about this article and how it relates to the very discussion that we're having.
Craig Mokhiber: Well you know the connection here obviously so this is a diplomatic grouping in the UN called WEOG and the UN organizes itself the delegations the countries organize themselves in so-called regional groupings.
There's five of them — four of those Regional groupings are regions you know — there's like Asia, Pacific, Africa, Latin America, Eastern Europe and then the fifth group is the only one that's not organized according to a region and it's the WEOG Western Europe and other group.
Well Western Europe is obvious but in my article I explained that the other group part is something very very interesting and what it represents is countries that are not in Europe but were states that were founded by European settler colonialism and you can list them — you know right it's the ..
United States,
Canada,
Australia,
New Zealand, and
Israel,
and during apartheid it also included South Africa right which sort of gives away the game so while the others are all regional represent regions this group which is Western Europe
and other group represents essentially the white world and that I point out in the article is very shocking to the casual reader, but for people who follow the study of international relations it's not shocking because the West has always centered its approach to international relations on race, so much so that international relations as an area of study used to be called “race relations,” and Foreign Affairs, which is the leading US publication on international relations, was originally called the Journal of Race Development and it always put whiteness at the center and at the top and others were somewhere down below and so you still have this vestige of this white supremacist colonial approach to international relations that is you know solidified in the current structures at the UN as a result of that and you can see it in the way that they vote so first of all they have disproportionate power so it's not democratic because these countries and this group actually has more power compared to its size than the Africans the Asians the Latin Americans and otherwise
Now they always try to defend or bill themselves as being a group of “Western democracies” but that's always been a lie because you know they've had throughout their their lifetime they've had a lot of non-democratic countries when when:
Spain and
Portugal and
Greece, their founding members of this group they were governed by dictatorships until the mid 1970s
South Africa and
Israel were both admitted as apartheid countries and the US of course until the mid 1960s had uh uh Jim Crow had a system of racial segregation so not really a democracy
And they're not all Western because some of them are in the South Pacific some of them are in the Middle East some of them are in Africa .. so they can call them “Western democracies”
Other times they've tried to say well we're kind of like the “Anti-Soviet block” or the “anti-communist block” but that's not true because
There are lots of countries around the world that were anti-communist anti-soviet but were never allowed to be members of the uh of the WEOG and so ..
It just it's my effort to pull back the curtain and show that you have this group that has disproportionate power that's based upon the vestiges of white supremacy and and colonialism and its voting in the UN does a lot of harm to the cause of Human Rights.
This is where you see real opposition to the UN's anti-racism work. It's where you see real opposition to the UN's work on indigenous people's rights, the rights of indigenous peoples, the right to development, especially in poor countries and obviously ..
It is the “Mainline” preventing self-determination and the full realization of Human Rights by the Palestinian people because this is the block, the only part of the world, that hasn't recognized the state of Palestine. First of all, many of them and secondly that blocks voting to provide them with protections for the human rights of the Palestinian people and you know it's just something that was kind of stuck in my craw when I was at the UN and I realized nobody has ever written about this as far as I can see so I thought it was time to tell the story.
READ ARTICLE:
WEOG: THE UN’S SETTLER-COLONIAL BLOC
Conclusion
“Calls for reform are growing. And if the UN is to survive, the vestiges of the colonial era will need to give way to more equitable diplomatic, political, and economic arrangements. The principles of the organization, including
self-determination,
human rights, and
equality
will need to play a more central role in intergovernmental processes.
And WEOG will need to find its place in a diplomatic museum, alongside the top hats, all-male meetings, and smoke-filled rooms of yesteryear.”
Source: Foreign Policy in Focus