Theories of State Development at the Dawn of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights

Abstract There is a significant temporal gap between the finalisation of the text of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights in 1966 and its doctrinal elaboration from the late 1980s onwards. This article shows how the Covenant was imagined at the height of the 50s and 60s era of decolonisation, modernisation theory and development planning. This was a time when there was a widespread hope that states of the Third World could soon replicate the socio-economic, industrial and stateness levels of the developed North. The Covenant was a decidely teleological mix of Western social democracy, Soviet-inspired social provision and Third World developmentalism. The Preamble and the provisions therein represented a confidence about the role that developmental, state-consolidating politics could play in the Global South. Before the doctrinal implications of these assumptions could be played out, the Covenant went into abeyance as it waited for the requisite numbers of ratifications through the 1970s and the elaboration of doctrinal machinery in the 1980s. As such, the context of drafting was distinctly different from the neoliberal milieu in which the Covenant was interpreted after the foundation of the Committee Economic, Social and Cultural Rights in the late 80s. This doctrinal elaboration whittled away and narrowed the Covenant’s Article 2(1) bedrock principle of progressive realisation. This process occurred with little reference to the history of the Covenant. It has meant that a somewhat defensive approach to the principle, one in which aspects like justiciability, non-retrogression, minimum core and a violations approach have grown from marginal to defining features, while the teleology implicit in the drafting process has shifted in the opposite direction from pivotal to peripheral. The doctrinal elaboration of these aspects is presented as an essentially timeless, organic emanation from the text. This presentation and understanding of the Covenant elides not only the extent to which other interpretations are possible, but the extent to which other, more expansive, less legalistic interpretations of Article 2(1) were latent at the time the Covenant was agreed.