EUROPEAN UNION WORLD

 Competing Universalisms since 1945

One of the results of the two world wars was not only the end of the Nazi racial empire in Europe, but the beginning of the disintegration of the colonial empires, in particular those of the victorious powersGreat Britain andFrance.

Only with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 and the decolonization of the world did human rights become universal in the sense that they were not supposed to apply exclusively to Europeans. As Mark Mazower demonstrates, in this process “human rights” (and later “development”) replaced the concept of civilization (and of “civilizing missions”) in international law and politics. In many ways, human rights acquired universality only after the demise of European international law and its exclusive standard of civilization.

This emergence of human rights during the midcentury crisis as a normative concept that claimed authority even beyond state boundaries stood (and continues to stand today) in tension with the principle of sovereignty. Like human rights, the global expansion of the nation-state as a model of political order is also a result of the cataclysmic history of the first half of the twentieth century and the implosion of the colonial empires. The new international order was thus constructed around two often mutually exclusive principles: individual human rights, which could also be asserted vis-à-vis one’s own state; and the principle of state sovereignty, which - as new states from Israel to India and Pakistan were convinced - rendered the state solely capable of guaranteeing rights.

The new intergovernmental organizations, declarations, and conventions, like international politics since 1945 in general, have thus been based on the principle of state sovereignty and have at the same time employed moral imperatives such as human rights that point beyond the nation-state. The second half of the twentieth century was defined by the global expansion of the nation-state and the increasing erosion of state sovereignty through (among other things) transnational legal norms such as human rights. Ideas about the equal sovereignty of states and of individuals emerged in tandem and in political tension with one another. This paradoxical constellation helps to explain the trajectories of human rights in the second half of the XX century, in particular the difficulties involved in their political implementation.

Once again we can identify four sets of problems:

(1) Cold War contestations and

(2) Decolonization, both primarily from the late 1940s to the early 1960s;

(3) The global campaign against pariah states such asChileandSouth Africaand the new humanitarianism; and

(4) The demise of communism and the emergence of dissidence inEastern Europe, both in the 1970s and 1980s.

Cold War Contestations

Human rights returned to the international arena during the Second World War as a unifying moral imperative for the states allied against Nazi Germany. Indeed, the war experience played a pivotal role for the international constitutionalism of the late 1940s. However, the “strange triumph of human rights” in the 1940s was based as well on the geopolitical interests of the Allies.

The (nonbinding) Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 contained a strategic dimension in the sense that it pushed the rights of individuals to the fore for the first time in international law while simultaneously ignoring the rights of minorities, lending the Allies a free hand for postwar population transfers, not least the expulsion of millions of Germans from East-Central Europe. (41) In their contributions to this volume, Dan Cohen examines the refugee crisis as an example for the postwar human rights revolution while Lora Wildenthal discusses the German case: The fact that postwar Germans were not included in the emerging international human rights regime confounded precisely those Germans who had not been Nazis, whereas Carl Schmitt, for instance, merely regarded his own views as confirmed by this. (42)

The consensus among the Allies quickly disintegrated as their interests diverged. During the Cold War the communist bloc and the decolonization movements insisted that a condemnation of racism and a guarantee of collective and social rights were essential dimensions of human rights, while the liberal democracies in the West emphasized individual and political rights, such as the right to free expression, that were already guaranteed in their constitutions.

The substance of human rights, in other words, was historically contingent and politically contested. Again, this is a history marked more by ruptures than continuities. In the early 1950s, theUnited Statesand the Soviet Union partially withdrew from attempts to establish an international human rights regime – theUnited Stateswas still a racially segregated society at this time, and the post-StalinistSoviet Unionhad only then begun to eliminate forced labor. (43) Within the scope of the European Convention on Human Rights (1950), the post-Fascist democracies ofItaly,France,Austria, andGermanywere prepared to cede sovereignty rights, in part out of fear of a return of political extremism within their own societies. (44)

This ceding of sovereignty rights by Western European nations would have been inconceivable without the constellation of the Cold War (and the demise of the colonial empires, an issue that will be addressed below). As Mikael Rask Madsen shows in his contribution, the new institutions of the European Court of Human Rights and the European Commission on Human Rights were not particularly significant for jurisprudence in the first two decades of their existence (the court issued few judgments until the 1970s), but they did serve as instruments for the political unification of the western half of the continent under conservative auspices in response to the challenge of communism. In the postwar era, anticommunism was more important for the emergence of a European human rights regime than the Holocaust. (45)

As Samuel Moyne’s essay contends, within the liberal democracies ofWestern Europeafter 1945 it was especially the Christian-Democratic parties that adopted the cause of human rights. Political Catholicism, which in the interwar period had still demonized the French Revolution, now discovered in human rights and the sacred concept of the person an effective strategy to conceal its own entanglement with the radical right and to infuse a religious dimension into the anti-totalitarian consensus of the West.

(41) Mark Mazower, “The Strange Triumph of Human Rights, 1933–1950,” Historical Journal , 47 (2004), 379–398; Mazower, “‘An International Civilisation?’ Empire, Internationalismand the Crisis of the Mid-20th Century,” International Affairs , 82 (2006), 553–566. For a more sanguine view see Elizabeth Borgwardt, A New Deal for the World: America’s Vision45 Marco Duranti,  “Conservatism, Christian Democracy and the European Human Rights Project, 1945–50,” PhD diss., Yale University, 2009. for Human Rights (Cambridge,Mass., 2005).

(42) See also Paul Betts, “Germany, International Justice and the 20th Century,” History and Memory , 17 (2005), 45–86. Schmitt wrote the following in a diary entry of December 6, 1949, expressing the prevailing sentiment among postwar Germans: “There are crimes against and for humanity. The crimes against humanity are committed by Germans. The crimes for humanity are committed on Germans.” Schmitt, Glossarium: Aufzeichnungen der Jahre 1947–1951 (Berlin, 1991), 282.

(43) Carol Anderson, Eyes off the Prize: The United Nations and the African American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944–55 (Cambridge, Mass., 2003); Mark Bradley, “The Ambiguities of Sovereignty: The United States and the Global Rights Cases of the 1940s and 1950s,” in Douglas Howland and Luise White (eds.), Art of the State: Sovereignty Past and Present (Bloomington, Ind., 2009), 124–147.

(44) Andrew Moravcsik, “The Origins of Human Rights Regimes: Democratic Delegation in PostwarEurope,” International Organisation , 54 (2000), 217–252.

(45) Marco Duranti, “Conservatism, Christian Democracy and the European Human Rights Project, 1945–50,” PhD diss., YaleUniversity, 2009.