Ideological (Mis)Use of Human Rights - David Chandler

More documents

Recommendations

Info

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. 08-goodhart-chap07.indd 126 12/9/08 3:06:01 PM
Conclusion Th ere can be no clear line of demarcation between the ideological use and (mis)use of human rights frameworks in international politics. Because human rights involve a separation between the agent of protection and the rights subject, there is no formal legal and political framework to judge whether claims of human rights at an international level are abused. Th e question is a normative one. Where there can be a greater level of consensus is at the empirical level: the rise of human rights approaches refl ects the declining importance of the UN Charter order of international law, and the development of more ad hoc and informal mechanisms of international regulation and intervention. It has been argued above that the demand to forward claims in the terminology of human rights refl ects a world in which the international legal order orientated around the constitutive rights of sovereign states is under challenge. Th is challenge takes the form of a shift from rights taking a purely legal form, the ‘black and white’ wording of the UN Charter, to an ethicojuridical form. Th is shift away from formal legal rights to more informal expressions of rights and duties could be described as a shift toward the dominance of human rights above the rights of states, or as emerging cosmo- QUESTIONS INDIVIDUAL STUDY QUESTIONS IDEOLOGICAL (MIS)USE OF HUMAN RIGHTS 127 politan legal norms. Th e shift away from legal rights, framed in terms of autonomy, self-determination, and non-intervention, to ethico-juridical rights refl ects a more hierarchical and interventionist order, in which issues that were considered to be the domestic aff airs of states have become internationalized—from peace processes to issues of internal governance. Human rights provide the framework for this internationalization. As considered above, the dynamic behind intervention and internationalization is not straightforward, whether this is seen as a matter of reasserting imperialist power or as a refl ection of domestic concerns of self-identity, mission, and purpose—or positively as a confl uence of self-interest and altruism, or even an act of selfl ess altruism—the fact remains that human rights frameworks refl ect a world in which the enforcement of rights is an unequal and contingent one and where international relations are more open to ad hoc and arbitrary policy responses. However we choose to understand the drive behind growing human rights regimes of regulation and intervention, it would be wrong to see the abuse or misuse of power as being an exception rather than the rule. 1. What is the difference between the subject of human rights and the subject of democratic and civil rights? Does it make a difference whether we claim rights as ‘humans’ or as ‘citizens’? 2. How do human rights claims challenge the framework of law? Does this make these claims progressive? If not, why not? 3. How did the framework of human rights help to legitimize the post-Second World War order based on state sovereignty? Did human rights clash with sovereignty during the Cold War? If not, why not? 4. Why do human rights approaches challenge the legitimacy of state sovereignty and of international law? 5. How has the debate on the relation between human rights and sovereignty changed between the 1990s and the 2000s? 6. What happens when state sovereignty is undermined? Does sovereignty go elsewhere? If so, where? 08-goodhart-chap07.indd 127 12/9/08 3:06:01 PM
Page 1 and 2: Ideological (Mis)Use of Human Right
Page 3 and 4: ambiguous and abstract nature of hu
Page 5 and 6: mechanisms of the exercise of power
Page 7 and 8: y the United States, Canada, the So
Page 9 and 10: famines and natural disasters could
Page 11 and 12: than undermining it. At the same ti
Page 13: Human Rights and the Search for Mea
Page 17 and 18: NOTES IDEOLOGICAL (MIS)USE OF HUMAN

Ideological (Mis)Use of Human Rights - David Chandler

You also want an ePaper? Increase the reach of your titles

Delete template?

Save as template?