(1) Human Rights: Past and Present

Introduction

 

 How can we adjudge to summary and shameful death a fellow creature innocent before God, and whom we feel to be so? – Does that state it a right? You sign sad assent. Well, I too feel that, the full force of that. It is Nature. But do these buttons that we wear attest that our allegiance is to Nature? No, to the King. Though the ocean, which is inviolate Nature primeval, though this be the element where we move and have our being as sailors, yet as the King’s officers lies our duty in a sphere correspondingly natural? So little is that true, that in receiving our commissions we in the most important regards ceased to be natural free agents.

 

Herman Melville, Billy Budd

 

Who would not agree today with Hannah Arendt’s famous dictum that there is and always has been an inalienable “right to have rights” as part of the human condition? Human rights are the doxa of our time, belonging among those convictions of our society that are tacitly presumed to be self-evident truths and that define the space of the conceivable and utter able. Anyone who voices doubt about human rights apparently moves beyond the accepted bounds of universal morality in a time of humanitarian and military interventions. The only issue still contested today is how human rights might be implemented on a global scale and how to reconcile, for example, sovereignty and human rights. Whether human rights in themselves represent a meaningful legal or moral category for political action in the first place appears to be beyond question.  

 

We try to explain how human rights attained this self-evidence during the political crises and conflicts of the 20th and 21st century. Implicit in this objective is the hypothesis that concepts of human rights changed in fundamental ways between the 18th and 21st centuries. Like all legal norms, human rights are historical. Initially formulated in the revolutions of the late 18th century, they almost disappeared from political and legal discourse in the 19th, while other concepts such as “civilization,” “nation,” “race,” and “class” gained dominance. Only in the second half of the 20th century did human rights develop into a political and legal vocabulary for confronting abuses of disciplinary state power (of “governmentality” in the Foucauldian sense) - a claim foreign to revolutionaries of the 18th century, who believed that the nation-state would guarantee civil and human rights and who simply assumed that those parts of the world not yet organized as nation-states were extra-legal territories.

 

One of the paradoxical results of the catastrophic experiences of the two world wars and the subsequent wars of decolonization was that the notions of global unity and the equality of rights became objects of international politics. Our argument is that human rights achieved the status of doxa once they had provided a language for political claim making and counter-claims - liberal democratic, but also socialist and postcolonial. It was not until the last two decades of the 20th century that human rights developed into the “lingua franca of global moral thought.”  Only at this time were they invoked to legitimate humanitarian and military interventions, thereby serving as a hegemonic technique of international politics that presented particular interests as universal.

 

“Contemporary history begins,” as British historian Geoffrey Barraclough has famously stated, “when the problems which are actual in the world today first take visible shape; it begins with the changes which enable, or rather compel, us to say we have moved into a new era.”  As a legal norm and moral-political doxa , human rights – conceived as inalienable rights accorded to every human being – are a fundamentally new phenomenon indicative of the beginning of a new era, indeed, so recent that  historians have only just begun to write their history. The authoritative studies on human rights in international law and politics have not been written by historians.

 

 A rapidly expanding literature on human rights has emerged (in the West) since the 1990s, particularly in the disciplines of political science, philosophy, and law. Although scholars from these disciplines do occasionally argue historically, their primary objective has been to provide a normative and legal grounding for human rights in the present or to discuss the limits of humanitarian law.

In contrast, recent master narratives of 19th - and 20th century history  have tended to mention the issue of human rights only in passing (for example, C. A. Bayly’s Birth of the Modern World or Tony Judt’s Postwar ), although there have been notable exceptions (such as Mark Mazower’s Dark Continent ). The standard Cambridge History of Political Thought has no separate entry for human rights, while the article on human rights in the German conceptual-historical lexicon Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe does not move beyond the early 19th century. In short, there is an abundant literature on how to make human rights work, but less on the actual workings of human rights in the past.

 

This situation is beginning to change, as is demonstrated by Lynn Hunt’s recent study Inventing Human Rights. However, Hunt’s important account also makes clear how much this historical field is still in the making, particularly in regard to the question of presumed continuities in the history of human rights after 1800.  Recent histories of human rights, in most cases written by Anglophone scholars, have tended to provide a triumphalism and presents account (“the rise and rise of human rights”),  thereby distorting past figures and institutions such as the anti-slavery movement, which did not employ rights-talk and had rather different objectives and accomplishments.

In contrast, our contention is that human rights in their specific contemporary connotations are a relatively recent invention. By focusing on the actual workings of human rights in the 20th century, we hope to provide a more nuanced account of the emergence of human rights in global politics and to establish an alternative framework for analyzing the political and legal quandaries of that history. We seek to move beyond the false dichotomy in contemporary human rights scholarship between moral advocacy, on the one hand, and charges of political hypocrisy, on the other. In contrast to the prevailing conception of a natural evolution of human rights, our aim is to understand human rights as a historically contingent object of politics that gained salience internationally since the 1940s – and globally since the 1970s – as a means of staking political claims and counterclaims.

Only in the crises and conflicts of the second half of the 20th century did a conceptual version of human rights emerge that corresponds to the current moral universalism. Thus in order to write a genealogy of human rights, this conceptual transformation – elicited by and formative of social and political events, movements, and structural changes – must be traced diachronically and transnational. We seek to determine more precisely how historical conflicts about the universality of human rights were incorporated into their different meanings, and thus how the genesis and substance of legal norms were historically intertwined. Can we conceive of a genealogy of human rights that narrates their history not teleological as the rise and rise of moral sensibilities, but rather as the unpredictable results of political contestations?

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