International Human Rights as Consensus or Domination

Human rights, the idea that there are certain essential political, social, and economic entitlements due to individual persons for the individuals’ single merit of being human, is the major context for the preservation and defense of human dignity in the modern world. The current embodiment of an understanding of human rights is found in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the international regime which derives from it, composed of non-governmental organizations, associations of sovereign states and others, is known as the UDHR model. It originated in the modern West and was spread to the rest of the world by a variety of means. Jack Donnelly argues that human rights evolved in the modern West as a reaction to the increasing power of markets and the rise of capitalism, which threatened the previous traditional defensive institutions of human dignity by drastically reducing the power of traditional communities (Donnelly 59). With the spread of markets’ power and the creation of an international market in which Western states and firms dominated, and non-Western traditional communities were similarly threatened, the globalization of human rights inevitably followed. While there are alternatives that seek to achieve the same goal, the hegemony of human rights goes largely uncontested

The question over the validity of human rights is not one of efficacy or viability in non-Western nations, as even regime critics like Bilahari Kausikan agree that human rights language is now a necessity for all states, Western and non-Western, wishing to claim legitimacy (Kausikan 27). Kausikan explains that in the post-Cold War world, the lack of a Soviet threat means Western nations are “no longer constrained in their efforts to advance their fundamental values for fear of driving nations into Moscow’s arms” (Kausikan 27). What opponents to the human rights regime argue is that, human rights, a Western-originated system, is inextricably bound to Western values like Judeo-Christianity and natural law, and is therefore deaf and destructive to cultures other than its own. They claim that the adoption of human rights according to the UDHR model by non-Western nations is essentially post-colonial collaboration with Western imperialism, and an imposition on non-Western conceptions of human rights and dignity (Kausikan 32).

I will argue the weak relativist position concerning the Western specificity of human rights- while the historical reality is that human rights originated in the modern West, and therefore has culture-specific traits that inform human rights discourse in the West, human rights is based upon universal human values common, in varying manifestations, to all world cultures. Human rights is not the only conceivable regime which may effectively defend human dignity. However, because of the historical reality of Western dominance and cultural diffusion, it is the most viable. Human rights has not spread in a vacuum, but has been accompanied by equally Western structures which have been irrevocably internalized by the non-Western world. Political structures such as the state, representative democracy, and even the United Nations, are well suited to support the human rights regime.

Questions of cultural imperialism in relations to human rights become facetious and detrimental to all peoples without a cohesive proposal that would replace not only the human rights regime, but also the Western system of sovereign nation-states and markets. I contend, like Donnelly, “modern nation-states and contemporary nationalist regimes that have replaced traditional communities and practices cannot be judged by standards of a bygone era” (Donnelly 101). As culturalist arguments against the international human rights regime are often used by oppressive non-Western regimes to seek exclusion from standards of protection of human dignity (Donnelly 100), I believe the better way to address issues of imperialist imposition is in questioning Western chauvinism and paternalism in the application of the human rights regime in non-Western nations, developing culture-specific and sensitive arguments in favor of human rights, and create indigenous systems for guaranteeing human rights.

Makau Mutua critiques the evolution of international human rights as containing a subtextual metaphor of “savage-victim-savior” (SVS) that posits the major participants in the human rights regime, Western states, academics, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) as rescuing the victims of abuse in the rest of the world (Mutua 202). He links this to the racist narrative of Western civilization’s dominance over non-Western “barbarism,” with the state as both the guarantor and greatest threat to human rights (Mutua 203). SVS is, therefore, merely a continuation of the Western colonial project, as evidenced by the rhetoric of the human rights discourse, as well as the untenable claims and assumptions of equality between nations (Mutua 206). Indeed, the U.N. Charter presents unrealistic descriptions of faith in “the equal rights… of nations large and small” when in fact no such equality has existed (United Nations). It also presents a promise to “practice tolerance and live in peace as good neighbors,” which is contradicted by the West’s history of imperialism and insistence on interventionist practices. Mutua sees the continuation of imperialist domination justified by human rights rhetoric as the rule rather than the exception, due to the inherently colonialist and Eurocentric outlook of the human rights regime.

The empirical reality of abuse of the human rights rhetoric can easily be seen in United States “humanitarian” interventions in Latin America, including support of the Contras in Nicaragua in the 1980’s, through to alleged U.S. intervention in the 2002 coup against Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez and the 2008 Andean diplomatic crisis, where FBI and CIA support was given to Colombian president Álvaro Uribe’s military violation of Ecuadorian airspace in search of Marxist rebels. However, as Mutua himself recognizes, these are all abuses of the forms of human rights, not the basic moral validity of human rights itself. The efficacy of human rights as an analytical tool is proven in that, even when crimes are committed in the name of humanitarian interests, the crimes inevitably incur more violations of the kind they are supposedly combating, thereby becoming indefensible to the regime and illegitimated before the international community.

For example, the U.S.-Colombian incursion into Ecuador was justified by a predicated battle against the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), which Colombia, the United States, and the European Union consider a terrorist organization, but whose status in Latin America is much more contested, with several nations calling for FARC’s recognition as a belligerent insurgency. FARC’s practice of civilian kidnappings, reprehensible as it is, provides little argument in favor of the rights violations committed by the Colombian army, which included a breach of national sovereignty and, according to some reports, the massacre of unarmed and sleeping FARC troops.

The human rights system proves its robustness and widespread acceptance in Latin America, as evidenced by the fact that all Organization of American States members, primarily Venezuela, Ecuador, and Colombia, charged one another with human rights violations, and other Latin American states participate in the FARC-Colombia conflict through the human rights regime, for example, President Chávez’s negotiation of hostage releases, and Venezuela’s continued call for belligerence recognition for FARC, which would then make them subject to human rights regulation and the Geneva Convention, which the FARC rebels claim they nevertheless already obey. This reality is in direct contradiction to Mutua’s claim that “the human rights movement will ultimately fail because it is perceived as an alien ideology in non-Western societies” (Mutua 208).

Mutua is right to highlight the Eurocentric assumptions of many, if not most, human rights guiding documents, and link them to a masked continuation of imperialism under a seemingly benevolent neoliberal guise. Certain implicit demands in human rights documents are clearly culture-specific, such as the expectation that all states should be organized along the liberal democratic model (Mutua 223). This expectation is not merely bound in the guiding texts themselves, but is insinuated in the broader human rights discourse. Inoue Tatsuo, arguing against essentialists who claim that “Asian values” are incompatible with liberal democracy, goes on to explain how this model is viable and in fact appropriate to Asia. He defines liberal democracy as “democracy not only with due respect not only for economic freedoms but also for civil and political liberties” (Tatsuo 42). No address is made of the desirability of a liberal democracy in Asia, or of any possible alternative to this political system, yet through his own assumptions, Tatsuo touches on an important point- the division of non-Western cultures into static homogenous wholes at odds with each other are not only politically dangerous and in opposition to human rights, but is also inaccurate, and largely a Western construct (Tatsuo 43).

Tatsuo, like Donnelly, stresses the importance of recognizing the complexity of cultures and their nature as “sites of contestation” (Donnelly 102), and therefore irreducible to such wide generalizations as the incompatibility of human rights and any non-Western culture. To do so, as Donnelly explains, is a genetic fallacy- “From a causal or historical account analysis of the genesis of a social practice, we cannot conclude anything about its appropriate range of applicability” (Donnelly 69). Mutua makes an otherwise excellent critique of colonialist attitudes and imperialist projects entrenched in the international human rights regime, ad this is of vital importance if human rights are to survive the internal assault of Western states attempting to impose the UDHR model through the currently favored mix of military and economic intervention facilitated by neoliberal policies and international semi-governmental organizations such as the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which are perceived by many non-Western people as purveyors of Western dominance, submission, and victimization (Mutua 242). Mutua’s argument is only weakened by his wholesale rejection of the human rights regime. What he calls a “failure to problematize the human rights project” is mirrored in his own eagerness to equate the regime to the values of human rights themselves, and his unrealistic separation of human rights as a Western construct and other Western-originated systems such as liberal democracy and even the modern nation-state.

Opponents of the international human rights regime make no argument that there exist cultures without any sense of human dignity or values. Instead, they posit differing definitions of value, and sometimes, different conceptions of humanity (Donnelly 84). Weak cultural relativists similarly make no argument in defense of human rights as the only possible system of defense of human dignity. Instead, the possibility of competing forms is recognized, and then the viability of each form analyzed. Given that Western imperialism and colonization, followed by a continued hegemony, has imposed identifiably Western structures upon the rest of the world, and that said structures continue to be exploited for Western benefit and often to the devastating loss of non-Western people, I believe it logically follows that a system similarly suited to function in such structures would be the best approach to challenging Western imperialism and establishing a universal consensus on the defense of human dignity. Such a system is human rights. This regime, if adopted by non-Western people and kept under continuous watch for imperialist and Western-centric encroachment into its application, may grow to become “culturally grounded program[s] for social change” (Mutua 242) which at once empower non-Western people to advance and develop human rights from their own cultural context and unites the global struggle for human rights in the universal values of human dignity.

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Works Cited

Donnelly, Jack. Universal Human Rights in Theory and Practice. 2nd. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003.

Kausikan, Bilahari. “Asia’s Different Standard.” Foreign Policy 92 (1993): 24-41.

Mutua, Makau. “Savages, Victims, and Saviors: The Metaphor of Human Rights.” Harvard International Law Journal 42.1 (2002): 201-245.

Tatsuo, Inoue. “Liberal Democracy and Asian Orientalism.” The East Asian Challenge for Human Rights. Ed. Joanne R. Bauer and Daniel A. Bell. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. 27-59.

United Nations. “United Nations Charter.” 25+ Human Rights Document. New York: Center for the Study of Human Rights, Columbia University, 2005. 1-4.