Ideological (Mis)Use of Human Rights - David Chandler

116 D. CHANDLER
Box 7.2 Hannah Arendt and Carl Schmitt on
Human Rights
Hannah Arendt on Human Rights
. . . the public sphere is as consistently based on the law
of equality as the private sphere is based on the law
of universal difference and differentiation. Equality, in
contrast to all that is involved in mere existence, is not
given us, but is the result of human organization insofar
as it is guided by the principle of justice. We are not born
equal; we become equal as members of a group on the
strength of our decision to guarantee ourselves mutually
equal rights. (Arendt, 1973, p. 301.)
Carl Schmitt on Human Rights
Humanity as such cannot wage war because it has no
enemy, at least not on this planet. . . . When a state
fi ghts its political enemy in the name of humanity, it is
not a war for the sake of humanity, but a war wherein a
particular state seeks to usurp a universal concept against
a military opponent. . . . The concept of humanity is an
especially useful ideological instrument of imperialist
expansion, and in its ethical-humanitarian form it is
a specifi c vehicle of economic imperialism. Here one
is reminded of a somewhat modifi ed expression of
Proudhon’s: whoever invokes humanity wants to
cheat. To confi scate the word humanity, to invoke
and monopolize such a term probably has certain
incalculable effects, such as denying the enemy the
quality of being human and declaring him to be an
outlaw of humanity; and a war can thereby be driven to
the most extreme inhumanity. (Schmitt, 1996, p. 54.)
fore an arbitrary one. Arendt argues that it may result
in ‘privileges in some cases, injustices in most’ because
‘blessings and doom are meted out to them [bearers of
human rights] according to accident and without any
relation whatsoever to what they do, did, or may do.’
(Arendt, 1973, p. 296.)
For Arendt, human rights frameworks, in separating
the rights bearer from the agent capable of enacting
these rights, legitimize a framework that is in fact worse
than that suggested by Bentham’s view of pious wishes
and utopian dreaming. Arendt suggests that a fi eld of
fi ctitious ‘rights’ is opened up that is inherently open to
abuse and arbitrary interpretation and enforcement.
Carl Schmitt, a German legal and political theorist,
writing at the same time as Arendt, was also critical of
the idea of universal human rights. Schmitt approached
the subject from the opposite end of the spectrum (not
from the viewpoint of the human rights subject—the
individual claiming human rights—but that of the external
actor deemed to be responsible for enforcing human
rights). He argued that claiming to intervene militarily
on behalf of universal human rights was an act of power
rather than principle, stating famously that ‘whoever
invokes humanity wants to cheat’ (see Box 7.2).
Schmitt makes similar points to Arendt in arguing
that the concepts of ‘humanity’ and of ‘human rights’
are empty abstractions, i.e. that they do not correspond
to any political reality of constituted rights and duties.
Schmitt argues that the concept of human rights may
well have had a useful polemical appeal at the end of
the eighteenth century as a rallying cry against the then
existing aristocratic feudal system and the inequalities
and privileges associated with it. However, this did
not mean that the era of universal human rights had
arrived. Th e fact that the world is divided into diff erent
and distinct political societies or states means that universal
rights-bearing individuals do not exist. If they
did exist then we would have a universal government,
giving political and legal form to those universal rights
(Schmitt, 1996, p. 55).
For Schmitt, in the absence of a unifi ed world government
that could constitute the universal human being as
a rights-bearing subject in reality, human rights claims
will have no clear court of adjudication or mechanism
of enforcement. Schmitt argued that humanitarian
action could be unproblematic if it was based on
inter-state agreement and administered through a nonpolitical
body, such as the International Committee of
the Red Cross (ICRC). His point was that if abstract
human rights claims were set against the agreed constituted
rights framework then they threatened confl ict
and instability. Th is was because the subject of these
claims was separate from the agency enforcing them.
Th e enforcement of claims of non-socially constituted
legal subjects is necessarily an arbitrary one, decided
by questions of power rather than principle. Schmitt
feared that universal claims to judge the needs or interests
of ‘humanity’ were not just illegitimate acts of
power rather than law per se, but that they were also
dangerous and destabilizing in a politically divided
world (Schmitt, 1996, pp. 53–58).
The Paradox of Human Rights
Th e points made by Hannah Arendt and Carl Schmitt
get to the heart of the paradox of human rights. Th eir
capacity for challenging power as well as for being
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