The United States, which was both less invested than the UK and France in the old order of European colonialism and more anxious about allowing the Soviets to monopolise the language of progress, worked to construct a civilisational discourse adequate to a new era of universal rights. Eleanor Roosevelt told the delegates that while there were 'peoples of different levels of development in various parts of the world', this did not mean they were naturally inferior, but that they had not had the same opportunities for development. Such arguments would become central to the neoliberal civilising missions of the later twentieth century.

Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, loc. 84