Ideological (Mis)Use of Human Rights - David Chandler

126 D. CHANDLER
Box 7.5 The Pessimism of Human Rights
Michael Ignatieff on Universal Humanitarianism
In the twentieth century, the idea of human universality
rests less on hope than on fear, less on optimism about
the human capacity for good than on dread of human
capacity for evil, less on a vision of man as maker of
his history than of man the wolf toward his own kind.
(Ignatieff, 1998, p. 18.)
Alain Badiou on Ethics
Whether we think of it as the consensual representation
of Evil or as concern for the other, ethics designates
above all the incapacity, so typical of the contemporary
world, to name and strive for a Good. . . . For from the
beginning it confi rms the absence of any project, of
any emancipatory politics, or any genuinely collective
cause . . . ‘concern for the other’ signifi es that it is not a
matter—that it is never a matter—of prescribing hitherto
unexplored possibilities for our situation, and ultimately
for ourselves. (Badiou, 2001, pp. 30, 33.)
displaced instrumental national interests because
governments have little sense of themselves as representatives
of a collective social project. Human rights claims,
because of their ungrounded and abstract nature, fi ll the
vacuum by providing an ethical purpose or set of ‘values’
that no longer need to be strategically acted upon. Th e
lack of clear instrumental or strategic political goals
becomes repackaged as an asset rather than a problem.
Human rights abuses (like the threat of terrorism) are
held to be issues of urgency, crisis, or emergency, where
strategic thinking and long-term planning are no longer
called for (see Chandler, 2007b).
Th e shift from national or collective political interests
to global or ethical values indicates a fundamental
shift in both the meaning and practice of politics. Th e
importance of this shift is indicated in Max Weber’s
essay on ‘Politics as a Vocation’. Here he argued that
there were ‘two fundamentally diff erent, irredeemably
incompatible maxims’, the ‘ethics of conviction’
and the ‘ethics of responsibility’ (Weber, 2004, p. 83).
Th e former is about being judged on intention, the
expression of values as a statement about oneself; the
latter is about being judged on outcomes, the expression
of political action as a strategic and instrumental
engagement in the world. It would appear that, in the
framework discussed in this section, the shift from
strategic interests to ethical values is not primarily
about the recasting of interests in an ideological form,
but more a rejection of the responsibilities of power.
In the new world order of human rights and universal
humanity it would seem, states Laïdi, that ‘there is no
longer any distance between what one does and what
one aspires to’, with human rights acting as the discursive
framework through which political programmes
and long-term projects can be side-stepped.
Ironically, the search for values and meaning in the
discursive frameworks of human rights and humanitarianism
exposes the lack of strategic interests behind
military interventions and other forms of human
rights conditionality and regulation. Acting on behalf
of the ‘ethics of conviction’ exposes the lack of genuine
conviction or strategic concern behind international
interventions under the banner of ‘human rights’, and,
for that matter, the ‘war on terror’. Interventions and the
use of the international arena to fi nd a sense of mission
and shared values exposes Western intervention as
merely an act of power without meaning (Laïdi, 1998, p.
109). For Laïdi, attempts by Western states and, through
them, international institutions, to project their power
in order to generate meaning are doomed to failure.
Th is can be understood as a failure in a double sense.
Firstly, because the intervention itself is not primarily
concerned with the object of intervention there is, therefore,
little strategic or instrumental concern with regard
to fi nal outcomes. Secondly, there is failure with regard
to the attempt to use intervention, or the international
sphere more broadly, to generate meaning and purpose.
Th is is because the problem of meaning is an internal
one, based on the lack of connection between governing
elites and their societies (see Chandler, 2007a, 2007b).
KEY POINTS
Human rights discourses and practices of intervention
do not necessarily have to be understood as the narrow
projection of traditional great power or imperial interests.
The asymmetries of power, of Western domination, allow
the international sphere to be used as an arena for the
creation of meaning or purpose, for both governments and
individuals.
The use of the international sphere to generate a sense of
‘mission’ leads to the projection of Western power with
little strategic or instrumental consideration. This can be
highly destabilizing.
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