Was drawing up human rights really such a good idea?
Anyone who questions the existence of universal human rights can count on outrage. Yet that's exactly what I'm going to do here.
In September 1994, US troops invaded Haiti. The violent Haitian military junta was overthrown. The United Nations took over the administration of the country.
There was a UN resolution denouncing “systematic violations of civil liberties” by the regime. The military regime had come to power three years earlier in a coup. Thousands of Haitians were killed as opponents of the junta. The junta had the press muzzled, farms were being destroyed. Partly due to a UN trade embargo, the poverty-stricken country also fell into a deep economic crisis.
By itself, this would not have led to action, but the United States was faced with hundreds of thousands of Haitians trying to flee the country, mostly by boat, primarily to Florida (mostly unsuccessful). The UN resolution was not uncontroversial, especially in Latin America. Mexico protested that it "sets an extremely dangerous precedent in international relations" because the crisis "does not pose a threat to peace and international security."
Human rights violations now legitimise foreign powers to invade a country. They can override the regime and take over the administration. Governments worldwide must reckon with an intervention on their sovereignty by the United Nations. What makes human rights such a powerful concept?
In 1948, the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It is the mothership of human rights: it was followed by all sorts of more specific human rights treaties. Several parts of the world, including Europe, agreed on more binding treaties.
For many, the existence of human rights is self-evident. Nasty regimes can be identified mainly by their human rights violations. Organisations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch are considered undisputedly heroic in our civilisation. There is some discussion among human rights scholars, but mainly about the question of how we can make compliance even more effective. Anyone who wants to question the existence of universal human rights can count on outrage. Yet the existence of universal human rights is problematic. It starts with the genesis. The official historiography on it is too mealymouthed.
Roosevelt's motives
In 1940, American President Franklin Roosevelt saw its European allies fall into the hands of the Nazis. Japan was militarily active in China. In doing so, Japan seriously frustrated the United States’ plans for China. A world war was imminent and his country's involvement seemed only a matter of time. Roosevelt, however, faced an isolationist parliament. It saw little in the way of meddling in the conflict. In his State of the Union speech of January 6, 1941, he defined four essential human freedoms, the Four Freedoms, which he believed to be universally valid:
Freedom of speech;
Religious freedom;
Freedom from want: a healthy life in peacetime for all;
Freedom from fear: worldwide disarmament so that no country will be able to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbour.
It cannot be said that Roosevelt’s speech was insincere. He probably meant what he said. Many Americans thought of (and still consider) themselves an exceptional nation with a mission. That exceptionalism was derived in large part from pride in its constitution with a Bill of Rights. The prosperous, powerful nation saw itself as an example to the rest of the world, also in a moral sense.
But there were also other motives for the speech. The United Kingdom was openly being supported in its fight against Hitler. A final confrontation with Hitler seemed inevitable. But Roosevelt had insufficient domestic support for a declaration of war; purely geopolitical and economic motives did not convince the isolationists in particular. The combination of an attack on their own territory (the Japanese bombing of the American fleet in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii) with the narrative of an ideological struggle of good against evil would ultimately provide that support.
Until 1941, Churchill had to beg for American support. That support came eventually, but at a price. The United Kingdom was still a colonial world power. Roosevelt had an ideological aversion to colonialism. This aversion also had an economic motive. After the decolonisation of Latin America in the 19th century, the United States had a very profitable backyard there. The continent provided cheap raw materials and a stable sales market. Corporate America thought that the same model might work in Asia and Africa. In the Atlantic Charter of 1941 between Churchill and Roosevelt, the Four Freedoms were reaffirmed and the term human rights appeared on the scene. And it was also agreed that all nations had the right to self-determination. Churchill could get American support, but it would ultimately cost Britain its colonies (which Churchill firmly denied until denial was no longer tenable). The Atlantic Charter would form the basis of the later Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Politicians rarely come up with anything themselves. The term human rights had not spontaneously occurred to Roosevelt. The word had been used repeatedly by Pope Pius XI in 1937, in connection with human dignity and natural law. Through the pope, the term became commonplace in influential Catholic circles in the United States. In particular to take a stand against Hitler, especially because of his anti-church attitude. Contrary to what one might expect, Hitler's treatment of the Jews hardly played a role in this, any more than the Holocaust would play a major role in the creation of the human rights declaration.
Outside the Christian world, the term human rights had hardly been noticed. There, the idea that people have innate rights was an exotic idea anyway. Insofar as attention was paid to Roosevelt's hobby horse, it was mainly prompted by the beckoning decolonisation. When it became apparent during the drawing up of the UN treaty that self-determination rights of peoples were not on the menu, interest in human rights from Asia and Africa quickly waned.
The founding of the United Nations was clearly an American junket. Roosevelt and Stalin had won World War II; the rest of the world played second fiddle. The founding meeting took place in San Francisco, the headquarters would be located in New York, on a piece of land donated free of charge by the Rockefellers, a family of billionaires with stakes in Exxon and Chase Manhattan bank, much involved in real estate, philanthropy and world politics.
The United Nations came about almost casually. Roosevelt had seen a lot in it, but he had died. Immediately after the capitulation of Japan in 1945, the Cold War began, and it absorbed all the attention. The world was divided into spheres of influence and decolonisation made that process even more exciting.
Insofar as attention was paid to the establishment of the UN at the top level, it mainly related to the Security Council, who sat on it, and who was allowed the right of veto. The further treaty was left to the lower echelons. Particularly when the US and Stalin had stipulated that the human rights declaration would not be given enforceable status, political interest in it had dwindled. The human rights section of the treaty was seen as a noncommittal preamble. The creation was left to what was condescendingly called: the ladies' table.
In the next newsletter I will discuss in detail the development of the human rights treaty, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In short: it was a Western get-together, under the American presidency, and with considerable catholic and socialist influences.
The Cold War had just begun. What Stalin thought of the preamble was watched with suspicion by the drafting committee. The rest of the world, especially Africa and Asia, hardly mattered. Those countries had something else on their mind: the imminent decolonisation. Their opinions weren’t heard. Islamic input was virtually nil. Asian input was limited to one westernised Taiwanese. For the sake of form, he was listened to politely. Knowledge of Hindu and African philosophy was non-existent.
Letting the horse out of the stable
For decades, universal human rights lived dormant. After all, the Universal Declaration was a non-committal document that all kinds of regimes continued to flout. But that would change in the 1970s. The appearance of John Rawls’ A theory of justice (1971) may have had influence, or else a tidal wave of social democrats in power in western democracies. In academia, you were virtually an outcast if you didn't profess socialism in any form. The after-effects of the 1968 "revolution" were palpable, fueled in part by the exposure of the United States as a brutal loser in Vietnam.
In 1977, Jimmy Carter was elected President of the United States. He had promised to come clean after the Vietnam trauma. International politics would no longer be determined by cynical geopolitics and an armed peace with the Soviets, but by détente and idealism. Amnesty International would be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize the same year; human rights were henceforth central to American foreign policy, and could legitimise international intervention.
It goes without saying that regimes that had to deal with interventions were not very pleased with this ethical policy. But mostly it concerned regimes that didn't have much influence anyway: Uganda, Haiti, Somalia, Rwanda.
Until China put down a rebellion in Beijing in 1989, which led to worldwide protest. But China did no longer want to be lectured. You can't annoy China more than by lecturing them about human rights, about the Uyghurs and the Tibetans. Mind your own business, is the standard response from Beijing. Watch your own. Human rights are nothing more than Western imperialism in a moralistic guise. Do the Chinese have a point?
The origin of human rights
The basis of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights were the American and French constitutions of 1789. The assignment to the committee literally stated that there should be a universal “Bill of Rights”. One of the most famous committee members was the French jurist René Cassin, who spoke only French, listened to no one, and only wanted to know about his own French constitution.
Anyone who wants to know the origin of the Universal Declaration must therefore know where the French and American constitutions came from. Then you quickly stumble upon the English philosopher John Locke. His fame is mainly due to his Essay concerning the true original, extent, and end of civil government, published in 1690.
In that essay, Locke wrote that we can live well together without imposed, central authority, if we use our brains and respect natural law. A government, or a sovereign, is a fine idea, but it too must be bound by the natural rights that everyone is born with. The government must respect our natural rights.
What, then, are those natural rights according to Locke? In short: life, liberty and property. Everyone must respect that, including the government. And whoever wants to take your life, freedom or your property away from you is crossing the line.
It sounds reasonable. But Locke's view is not without reservations. I will devote a number of newsletters to those reservations.
Natural law
Locke assumes that there is such a thing as natural law. Natural law is the ethical view that certain norms are universal, objective, and "ingrained" in human nature, and may also derive from cosmic laws, regardless of how, where, or when people live. According to natural law theory, there are certain moral rules that are unquestionably true and universally valid. Whether that is the case remains to be seen.
There are, of course, laws of nature, such as the second law of thermodynamics. Whether we know all of them exactly and whether they are all always universally valid remains to be seen. But let's skip that for a moment.
Our human behaviour is also to some extent ingrained and predictable. For example, based on the theory of evolutionary kin selection, we universally want to spread and protect our genes. Parents, as a rule, walk through fire for their offspring. We are also born with a moral property module: what belongs to us, others should not touch. This module also applies to most animals. Try to take his bone from your dog and you'll see what I mean.
But the question remains whether we can attach ethical standards to this. Even if we manage to get a perfect picture of the natural laws: can we also formulate a natural law on the basis of that? And quite apart from that: what do we do when those natural laws conflict with each other? For example, we seem to be blessed not only with a moral property module, but also with a moral redistribution module. If you form a group, it will not be accepted if you keep everything to yourself and let others within the group starve.
Why didn't Locke include that? Maybe because he had overlooked it, or because it didn't fit his theory. And this brings us to another objection to natural law theory. Arguing that natural law exists is one thing. But formulating exactly what that natural law consists of is an almost impossible task. In fact, I don't think we can. Yet, Locke did, and before him Cicero and Tomasso d'Aquino. And after him it ended up in the French and American constitutions, and in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
What are rights, and when do we have them?
Another question is when we should enshrine moral judgments in law. Let me give an example. We just talked about the moral module of kin selection. We want to spread and protect our genes. Now there is the social phenomenon of the incel. That stands for involuntarily celibate: a subculture of people who live celibate against their will. Mostly young men. There are many. We know that they suffer. The urge to procreate is as ingrained as, for example, our tendency to protect our property, and our urge to retaliate. And also from a societal point of view, it would be better if they found a sexual partner. Why then is there a right to enjoy art (Article 27 UDHR), but no right to sex, a right to spread your genes?
The tendency to enshrine moral ideals in law appears to be specifically of European origin. Most cultures speak of moral duties rather than rights. Where does our preference for rights come from, and what effects does that have? To reveal the answer in advance: it leads to a juridification of society. The question is whether that is wise. I will go into more detail about this in a future newsletter.
How dignified are we really?
Article 1 of the Universal Declaration reads:
All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.
So not only are we naturally free and equal, we all have rights, but we also apparently have dignity.
If we delve into the term human dignity, we could come to remarkable conclusions. You may personally feel that you deserve dignity, and that others should behave with dignity. But whether we are born with it is still very much the question. Human dignity turns out to be an umbrella term, a repository of philosophical ideas from which everyone grabs what they like. I myself think that the term human dignity cannot hold philosophically and is too ambiguous to base universal human rights on. I will also write a separate newsletter about that.
The effect of human rights
I have already written about the juridification of society as a result of the phenomenon of rights. But there are many other effects, not all of which are beneficial.
In the first place, the idea of universal human rights has increasingly been imposed by the West on the entire world. From roughly 1945 to 1989, the world was dominated by two power blocs: capitalism and communism. It seems that a new dichotomy is now emerging: Lockean versus Hobbesian states. I will write about the dichotomy between John Locke and Thomas Hobbes in another newsletter in this series. Lockean states, usually led by the Anglo-Saxons, view the world in terms of rights and the protection of civil liberties from government. Hobbesian states, nowadays led by China, place less value on individualistic freedoms, and are more driven by national unity led by a strong government unfettered by legal constraints. Traditionally, the Lockean states have won that battle, but now that the Hobbesian states seem to be uniting under the leadership of China, it could get exciting.
Secondly, empirical research is occasionally conducted into the effects of human rights treaties. The findings are not optimistic. Human rights catalogues not only lead to juridification, individualisation and bureaucratisation. There are also hardly any positive effects in autocratic countries. The underlying values of human rights are alien to their culture. The regimes mainly make cosmetic adjustments that they usually get away with. How? You’ll read that in the next paragraph.
Universal human rights favour the superpowers. If you are an evil regime, you can get away with it by invoking the protection of a superpower. Of course, that protection doesn't come for free. Superpowers also have an interest in this: they buy political loyalty and a market with it. In return, dismal regimes are protected from international intervention by the United Nations. The superpowers can block it with a veto. Only losers such as Haiti, who had been unable to get support from any superpower, are being hit by a UN intervention as a result. Don't be a loser, is Haiti's lesson. Make yourself dependent on a superpower, else you will be at the mercy of the gods.
To conclude
Now you know what to expect in the coming weeks. Hopefully we will come to a coherent conclusion. Because as sceptical as I am about human rights, the benefits of toleration, autonomy and a degree of equal treatment and redistribution are beyond dispute. Not much attention will be paid to that in this series, but you will certainly still owe it.
Read more?
I refer here only to literature that has been incorporated in the first part of this newsletter. Literature on the creation of the Universal Declaration, natural law, human dignity, etc. will be mentioned in the following newsletters, which are specifically devoted to this.
Stephen E. Ambrose, Douglas G. Brinkley, Rise to globalism: American foreign policy since 1938 (1971/2011)
Wm. Roger Louis, American anti-colonialism and the dissolution of the British Empire, International Affairs (1985)
Paul Orders, ‘Adjusting to a new period in world history’: Franklin Roosevelt and European colonialism, in: David Ryan, Victor Pungong (red.), The United States and decolonization: power and freedom (2000)
Philippe Girard, Clinton in Haiti: the 1994 US invasion of Haiti (2004)
Samuel Moyn, The last Utopia: human rights in history (2010)
More episodes
This is the first newsletter in a series about human rights and toleration. The series consists of the following episodes:
Was drawing up human rights really such a good idea?
Anyone who questions the existence of universal human rights can count on outrage. Yet that's exactly what I'm going to do here.Our universal human rights are dated and not universal
About the creation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Why large parts of the world can actually shrug their shoulders about human rights.How to lose your dignity
Out of human dignity, everyone can make their own sense. This is convenient when looking for universal human rights. About the conflicting meanings of human dignity, and why we aren't born with it.No, by nature, you have no rights to anything
Why we aren't born with rights. Rights as a social construction. About natural law versus natural rights. About innate moral modules and our ingrained sense of justice.Against human rights
Anyone who is sceptical about human rights does not make himself popular. But since the 17th century, criticism of human rights has not been soft. On criticism from Hobbes, Bentham, Marx, the communitarians and the Confucianists.Down with human rights!
The negative effects of universal human rights predominate. We have to get rid of them. There are alternatives. We can move from rights to duties. From a legal to a moral dialogue.
Sarandë, 13 April, 2023
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