Historical Origins of Human Rights

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Historical Origins of Human Rights

• Lecture 19
• The Return of Human Rights in the Later Cold War
• April 4, 2007

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outline

• what did what human rights replace?
• Cold War stalemate and the rise of dissent
• 1968
• détente
• the contingent return of human rights

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filling a void or replacing something else?

• human rights culture did not fill a void always
  waiting for it
• it replaced some other culture -- some other way
  of morally organizing the world
• human rights first returned as part of diplomatic
  transformations
• this caused (quite unexpectedly) a transformation
  in the nature of idealism in civil society

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Cold War stalemate

• early Cold War total partisan claim
• by 1960, perception of unwinnability
• e.g., rough parity in nuclear weapons
• Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop
  Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)
• breakdown of Cold War domestic consensus in all
  countries

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stagnation and dissent

• explosive demographic change
• new voices criticizing tarnished and unfulfilled
  Cold War ideologies
• strikingly, human rights are not part of the
  language of dissent among students in the 1960s
• criticisms of private materialism and public
  stagnation
• luminaries John Kenneth Galbraith, Michael
  Harrington, Paul Goodman, Herbert Marcuse

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beyond civil rights, but not to human rights

• continuing subjugation of blacks proved to be the
  most serious evil against which young people
  mobilized, but no framing of radicalism in terms
  of human rights or international norms
• true that continuing subjugation of blacks proved
  to be the most serious evil against which young
  people mobilized, but they did not frame their
  radicalism in terms of human rights or
  international norms
• rather, the more radical civil rights movements
  in the 1960s were closely allied with a more
  general discourse of the hollowness of American
  life and the need for serious reforms that would
  change the culture
• Students for a Democratic Society
• Port Huron Statement (1962)

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as for the Eastern bloc

• in the Soviet Union, early voices of dissident
  consciousness
• Alexander Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of
  Ivan Denisovich (1962)
• loss of interest in patriotic duties
• Marxist humanism
• belief in the superiority, thanks to the
  reformability, of socialist
• wide variety of West and East European
  intellectuals, now convinced of the bankruptcy of
  communism, still believed in the search for some
  form of humane socialism
• socialism with a human face

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hope for a new communism

• failed investment in decrepit communism sometimes
  replaced, not by human rights talk, but instead
  by hopes of redeemed communism
• Cuban revolution (1959)
• Che Guevara (1928-1967)
• Ches politics of pity

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Che
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overall picture

• dissent never appealed to the language of human
  rights but to rhetoric of social change
• not law but politics
• popular mobilization
• Vietnam
• hypothesis key to the rise of human rights
  rhetoric is not simply the loss of faith in
  communism, but also the loss of faith in
  transformative politics of any kind, and
  therefore also in socialism with a human face

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1968

• 1968
• Berkeley
• Columbia
• Paris
• elsewhere
• the Prague Spring
• Alexander Dubcek

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Columbia then
six demands gym Institute for Defense Analysis
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Low Library
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Fayerweather
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Paris
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Poetry is in the streets
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Be realistic demand the impossible
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towards the 1970s détente

• Cold War rivals recognized a shared problem Cold
  War allegiances no longer absorbed their
  populations, significant numbers of whom had
  lost faith in the promises of their side to win
  the Cold War and create a better future
• so they eased their relations
• mutual recognition
• Willy Brandt and Ostpolitik

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why détente?

• Policymakers cooperated to protect their
  authority against a wide range of internal
  challengers. Détente was, in this sense, a direct
  reaction to the global disruption of 1968. From
  1969 through 1972 leaders in each of the major
  states attempted to reconstruct order from the
  international top down to the domestic
  bottom. They used agreement with foreign
  adversaries to contain increasingly virulent
  internal pressures. They used promises of
  international peace to deflect attention from
  domestic difficulties and to free their resources
  for repressive measures. Cooperation among the
  great powers reinforced established authorities.
  Despite the chaos on the streets, the years after
  1968 witnessed no significant institutional
  change in any of the major states. The politics
  of this period were profoundly conservative. At
  its core, détente was a period of domestic
  fortification (Jeremi Suri, Power and Protest).

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significance

• the language of human rights is initially the
  product of diplomatic détente this period of
  conservative state response to popular protest
• it reframes the shape idealism from below takes
• human rights came to prominence, very ironically,
  by displacing earlier languages of dissent
• its not that their effect proved conservative
  quite the contrary
• but (if this interpretation of détente is
  correct) their origins were

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détente diplomacy

• Richard Nixons visits to China and the U.S.S.R.
• Basic Principles of Relations between the United
  States of America and the Union of Soviet
  Socialist Republics (1972)
• Nuclear War Prevention Treaty (1973)
• no mention of human rights in these documents
  the only principle is the peace of cooperating
  superpowers

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from localization to generalization

• the Conference on Security and Cooperation in
  Europe (CSCE)
• the European version of détente ie, East-West
  mutual acceptance on European scale
• the West European community and human rights
• democracy and human rights were (Council of
  Europe, etc.) European norms, including ones that
  sovereigns were gingerly allowing to have legal
  significance, as of shortly after the World War
• early EC expansion linked to these issues
  (Greece, Portugal, Spain excluded while under
  authoritarian rule)

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Towards the Helsinki Accords

• Soviet desire for recognition and normalization
  of relations
• in particular, recognition of borders, hence of
  permanence of divide
• We would not welcome the intervention of other
  countries in our domestic affairs and we cannot
  expect them to be cooperative when we seek to
  intervene directly in theirs (Nixon, June 1974).
• Kissinger in 1974 on the Helsinki Accords They
  can write it in Swahili for all I care.

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the Accords

• Helsinki Final Act, 1975
• ten principles in three baskets
• Principle 1 Sovereign Equality The
  participating States will respect each other's
  sovereign equality and individuality as well as
  all the rights inherent in and encompassed by its
  sovereignty, including in particular the right of
  every State to juridical equality, to territorial
  integrity and to freedom and political
  independence. They will also respect each other's
  right freely to choose and develop its political,
  social, economic and cultural systems as well as
  its right to determine its laws and regulations.
• Principle 3 Inviolability of Frontiers The
  participating States regard as inviolable all one
  anothers frontiers as well as the frontiers of
  all States in Europe and therefore they will
  refrain now and in the future from assaulting
  these frontiers. Accordingly, they will also
  refrain from any demand for, or act of, seizure
  and usurpation of part or all of the territory of
  any participating State.
• Principle 6 Non-Intervention (Non-Interference?)
  in Domestic Affairs The participating States
  will refrain from any intervention, direct or
  indirect, individual or collective, in the
  internal or external affairs falling within the
  domestic jurisdiction of another participating
  State, regardless of their mutual relations. They
  will accordingly refrain from any form of armed
  intervention or threat of such intervention
  against another participating State. They will
  likewise in all circumstances refrain from any
  other act of military, or of political, economic
  or other coercion designed to subordinate to
  their own interest the exercise by another
  participating State of the rights inherent in its
  sovereignty and thus to secure advantages of any
  kind. Accordingly, they will, inter alia, refrain
  from direct or indirect assistance to terrorist
  activities, or to subversive or other activities
  directed towards the violent overthrow of the
  regime of another participating State.

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human rights

• Principle 7 Human Rights The participating
  States will respect human rights and fundamental
  freedoms, including the freedom of thought,
  conscience, religion or belief, for all without
  distinction as to race, sex, language or
  religion. They will promote and encourage the
  effective exercise of civil, political, economic,
  social, cultural and other rights and freedoms
  all of which derive from the inherent dignity of
  the human person and are essential for his free
  and full development. Within this framework the
  participating States will recognize and respect
  the freedom of the individual to profess and
  practice, alone or in community with others,
  religion or belief acting in accordance with the
  dictates of his own conscience. The
  participating States recognize the universal
  significance of human rights and fundamental
  freedoms, respect for which is an essential
  factor for the peace, justice and well-being
  necessary to ensure the development of friendly
  relations and co-operation among themselves as
  among all States. They will constantly respect
  these rights and freedoms in their mutual
  relations and will endeavour jointly and
  separately, including in co-operation with the
  United Nations, to promote universal and
  effective respect for them. They confirm the
  right of the individual to know and act upon his
  rights and duties in this field. In the field of
  human rights and fundamental freedoms, the
  participating States will act in conformity with
  the purposes and principles of the Charter of the
  United Nations and with the Universal Declaration
  of Human Rights. They will also fulfil their
  obligations as set forth in the international
  declarations and agreements in this field,
  including inter alia the International Covenants
  on Human Rights, by which they may be bound.

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transformations of idealism

• détente as related to the transformation of one
  kind of dissent into another
• 1) transformation of East European dissent in
  direction of human rights after Helsinki Act
• 2) transformation of West European dissent in
  direction of human rights, as one kind of
  idealism transforms into another
• 3) mutation of American anticommunism into
  respect for universal human rights