Rights, Nations, and Empires since 1800
- The concept of the “rights of man” ( droits de l’homme, Menschenrechte ), however, essentially vanished from European politics in the epoch between the 18th century revolutions and the world wars of the 20th century, or was replaced (again) by (civil) liberties. Rights that were supposed to hold for all humankind were as rare in international law as they were in the constitutions of the era. Nor did the notion of human rights have great currency in 19th and early-20th-century political thought.Tocqueville, Marx, and Weber all mentioned human rights only in passing and with palpable contempt. In contrast to prevailing conceptions of a seamless evolution of human rights, it is therefore necessary to explicate more clearly their historical reconfi gurations and ruptures between 1800 and 1945.
Let us briefly examine this issue in terms of the following four points:
1) Colonialism, international law, and humanitarianism were not mutually exclusive in the 19th century. Rather, those countries with liberal or republican legal traditions such as Great Britain and France engaged in particularly expansive colonialism. The movement to abolish slavery perhaps had less to do with a new enlightened sensibility for the “rights of man” than with the colonial “civilizing mission.”
2) The struggle for civil and social rights, rather than human rights, was central for constitutions and politics in 19th century Europe; and those who claimed such rights had no difficulty in withholding them from others.
3) Beginning in the 1860s international law did seek to delimit and “humanize” wars between states, but excluded the non-European world from this effort.
4) The homogeneous nation-state also served as the regulative idea guiding efforts to protect minorities both before and after the First World War. Genocide and expulsion were not impeded by such efforts, but instead became instruments of state population politics that aimed at an “ethnic cleansing” of the body politic.
