The Politics of Human Rights: A Global Perspective

The Politics of Human Rights

Human Security in the Global Economy

Series editor: Professor Caroline Thomas (University of Southampton)

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The Politics

of Human Rights

A Global Perspective

Second Edition

Tony Evans

First published 2001, second edition published 2005

by Pluto Press

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Copyright © Tony Evans, 2001, 2005

The right of Tony Evans to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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Contents

Series Introduction

HUMAN SECURITY IN A GLOBAL ECONOMY

The idea for this series grew out of a panel on human security at the British International Studies Association conference (BISA) in December 1998. Panellists expressed concern at the silence of the International Relations discipline in the face of growing inequality and widespread poverty that characterized the era of neoliberal development. The uneven distribution of the benefits of the globalization process, and the general failure of that process to attend to the human security of the majority of humanity, were noted. There was a desire to remove the intellectual blinkers arising from an emphasis on a state level analysis and to put people first.

The series is concerned with the area of convergence between International Relations and Development Studies. In contrast to most International Relations series, which take the state as the central unit of analysis, this series gives primacy to human beings and their complex social, political, economic and cultural relations. Importantly, the concept of human security pursued here differs fundamentally from competitive, possessive notions of security of the individual conceived in the currently fashionable neoliberal sense. Rather, human security describes a condition of existence in which basic material needs are met and in which human dignity, including meaningful participation in the life of the community, can be met. Thus while material sufficiency lies at the core of human security, in addition the concept encompasses non-material dimensions to form a qualitative whole. Human security is oriented towards an active and substantive notion of democracy, and is directly engaged with discussions of democracy at all levels, from the local to the global.

The series investigates the causes of human insecurity and the pursuit of human security. For the majority of humankind, human security is pursued as part of a collective, most commonly the household, sometimes the community defined along other lines such as religion, caste, ethnicity or gender or a combination of these. States play a critical role in the achievement of human security; they have the authority and the responsibility to attend to the human security needs of citizens. State–society relations come up for scrutiny, as fundamental questions arise concerning state capacity, state legitimacy and state collapse. Global processes may impact on, even jeopardize human security; thus these processes and the global governance structures that drive them need investigation. Regional organizations and global governance institutions set and implement the global development agenda and the global security agenda. Private transnational banks and transnational corporations exert a huge influence. Indeed the development of the global economy requires us to consider humanity embedded not simply within discrete territorial states, but within a global social structure, the capitalist world economy that has been developing since the sixteenth century. The aim is the exposure of policies which undermine the fulfilment of human security and the articulation of processes, policies and practices which support it.

Preface

This volume is not intended for those who want to delve more deeply into the existing rules and practices of the international human rights regime. Nor will it offer a detailed overview of particular human rights violations or particular historic instances where violations of human rights have been widely reported. Instead, the arguments presented here focus on the global politics of human rights. To follow this path is to engage in debates about human rights as power and interests. This does not imply that the ‘power of human rights’ serves the interests of the dispossessed, the marginalized, the persecuted or the excluded alone. Rather, the discussion here looks at the interests associated with globalization, and the part that the discourse of universal human rights plays in legitimating those interests.

As feedback on the first edition indicates, few readers remain indifferent to the politics of human rights. For those committed to the current universal human rights regime, arguments over politics, power and interests have little part to play in the effort to promote and protect human freedoms. For this group, human rights are neutral claims that seek to protect everyone from a denial of their natural rights. The politics of rights is a distraction – perhaps a heresy – the pursuit of which can only damage the global project for human rights. For others, however, the politics of rights allows an insight into many aspects of the global discourse of human rights that remain a puzzle. Why, for example, does the human rights regime take the form that it does? Why is such stress given to civil and political rights? What is the relationship between the globalization of the political economy and human rights? Why do we invest so much faith in international law solutions for protecting human rights? Are human rights violations inevitable, given the current world order? For this second group, politics does not present a challenge to promoting human rights but, rather, an opportunity to understand the current status and authority of human rights globally.

Together with some minor revisions to the chapters that appeared in the first edition, this revised second edition includes a new chapter (Chapter 2) that discusses the structure of the discourse of human rights, as it is practised today.

Introduction:

Globalization and the Study of Universal Human Rights

The general theme of this series is human security, defined as something more than the conventional concept of military security that has dominated the literature on international relations for so long. Following the United Nations Development Programme’s (UNDP) definition, human security refers to ‘safety from the constant threats of hunger, disease, crime and repression’ and ‘protection from sudden and hurtful disruptions to the patterns of our daily lives – whether in the home, in our jobs, in our communities or in our environment’. Human security is not therefore only to do with cataclysmic political and international events, but with ‘job security, income security, health security, environmental security … [and] … security from crime’ (UNDP 1994). The UNDP confirmed this approach to human security in its tenth annual Human Development Report, which argues that security is concerned with ‘widening the range of people’s choices’ and the means by which ‘people can exercise their choices safely and freely’ (UNDP 1999: 36). Accordingly, the purpose of human security is to provide the conditions for people to exercise and expand their choices, capabilities and opportunities free of insecurity, so that they may build a future for themselves and their children (Salih 1998). Whereas military security is concerned with external threats to the state, human security takes a more people-centred focus, particularly the need to create the necessary economic, social and political conditions for people to lead a dignified life. While in the past it may have seemed possible to achieve these conditions largely within the domestic political arena, today, under conditions of globalization, which many argue is placing severe constraints on state authority, achieving human security demands action at the global level (Cox 1994; Gill 1996; Panitch 1995).

Human security is therefore broader than the tradition that understands political community through the language of the territorial state, sovereignty and strategic studies, which stresses the importance of defence, the military and interstate conflict. Instead, those with an interest in human security point to important features of the state and the interstate system that represent barriers to achieving the conditions for leading a dignified life within the emerging global order. For traditionalists, the state remains the central participant in finding solutions to the new threats presented by globalization, even though the causes of these threats are located in new forms of social, political and economic transnational relations, for which a state-centric analysis fails to account. The criticism of the traditional approach to security is that it leads to conservative solutions, more concerned with sustaining the status quo than with seriously engaging in the challenges that globalization presents (Walker 1990).

This definitional shift in the security debate is not, therefore, an isolated development within the social science disciplines of international relations and politics, which like all other disciplines are occasionally subject to capricious new fads and fashions. Instead, it should be seen as a consequence of important changes to the global order, away from an international order of states towards an order best captured by the term ‘globalization’. This term, which has pervaded academic and popular debate since the end of the 1980s, has stimulated interest in developing a new language that reflects the emerging global order, as evidenced by terms like ‘global environmental change’, ‘global civil society’, ‘global gendered equality’ and ‘global development’ as measured by the UNDP’s Human Development Index. Part of this process includes redefining and reconfiguring old concepts to distinguish them from the past era. Some scholars have argued that the emergence of a new language is indicative of historic moments when ‘something important is unfolding’, like the moment, for instance, when the sovereign territorial state became the norm for organizing social relations during the eighteenth century (Scholte 1996). The creation and development of a new language is not, therefore, simply a cosmetic affair, but an attempt to describe, explain and critique a new social order that cannot be grasped by the language and concepts of the past.

GLOBALIZATION AND HUMAN SECURITY

Given that the concept of human security is mediated through the processes and practices of globalization, some brief account of the character of globalization is necessary. There are, of course, many disagreements on the exact nature of globalization, not only across disciplines but within disciplines also (Spybey 1996). However, most theories of globalization begin by broadly accepting that we are witnessing a significant shift in the spatial reach of networks of social relations, which are reflected in the growth of transcontinental, interregional and global relations. Globalization is understood as an historical process that both ‘stretches’ and ‘deepens’ transnational patterns of economic, political, military, technological and ecological interactions. ‘Stretching’ social relations suggests that events, decisions and activities in one part of the world often have an immediate impact on the economic, social and political well-being of individuals and communities in distant locations. This is distinguished from the ‘deepening’ of social relations, which suggests that patterns of interaction and interconnectedness are achieving both greater density and intensity (McGrew 1992; Held & McGrew et al. 1999). In the words of Anthony Giddens, although ‘everyone has a local life, phenomenal worlds for the most part are truly global’ (Giddens 1990: 187). The existence of physical, symbolic and normative infrastructures mediates this ‘stretching’ and ‘deepening’, for example, systems of air transportation, English as the language of business and science, and images of ‘one world’, as expressed in the debates on universal human rights and the environment. These infrastructures are themselves associated with the development and spread of new technology, which influences the scale of globalization and circumscribes social interactions (Buzan et al. 1993).

However, individuals, households and communities are differentially enmeshed in the processes and practices of globalization such that control over, and the impact of, these processes vary enormously both between as well as within societies. This differential reach and impact reflects structural asymmetries in the geometry of global power relations. Patterns of hierarchy and stratification mediate access to sites of power while the consequences of globalization are unevenly experienced. For example, the fact that the majority of the world’s trade is between Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries offers testimony to long-standing historical patterns of hierarchy and stratification in the global trading order (Taylor & Thomas 1999). Similarly, the dominant conception of human rights, which gives greater emphasis to civil and political rights rather than economic and social rights, prioritizes the interests of those closest to the processes of economic globalization rather than those on the periphery.

Like many other aspects of human security, efforts to protect universal human rights are not immune from the impacts of globalization. While some studies have attempted to recontextualize human rights as an important aspect of globalization, most, if not all, adopt a neoliberal approach, which tacitly assumes that globalization presents new opportunities for strengthening human security (e.g. Donnelly 1993). Neoliberals tend toward a view of globalization that projects a vision of inexorable progress towards ever increasing levels of ‘moral integration’, which parallels processes of economic integration, as normative and moral aspirations converge (Donnelly 1989: 211–13). According to neoliberals, these processes provide the context for the emergence of a global civil society, which will, in time, empower the global citizen in the struggle to claim universal human rights and the values associated with those rights. Neoliberals acknowledge that while the past era saw the development of legal standards for universal human rights, in the form of international law that reflects the timeless universalism of rights claims, implementation was inhibited by the principles on which the international system of states was built, including sovereignty, non-intervention and domestic jurisdiction (Cassese 1990). Today, so the argument continues, the conditions of globalization provide an opportunity to develop new forms of ‘humane governance’, including new and more effective ways of securing universal human rights (Clark 1999: 129).

Critics of neoliberal optimism are less sanguine. First, critics accuse neoliberals of a myopic vision of globalization, which stresses present and future benefits but remains blind to current, potential and future costs. These criticisms argue that the forms of global finance, capital accumulation and consumption associated with globalization are supported by new social, economic and political structures that are no less prone to processes of inclusion and exclusion than in previous periods. Second, critics point out that the institutions on which neoliberals place so much hope for securing human rights, including international law, may well be less effective under conditions of globalization because these institutions reflect the statist logic of the previous era, rather than those of the future. If under conditions of globalization the authority of the state has diminished, then international law, the law that governs relations between states, has less potential in regulating the practices of non-state transterritorial actors. Third, critics argue that it is demonstrably over-optimistic to claim that wide agreement has been reached concerning the nature and substance of universal human rights, as can be seen in the recent debates over ‘Asian values’ and the invisibility of women in the human rights debate (Pasha & Blaney 1998; Tang 1995; Peterson & Parisi 1998). Finally, critics argue that the uneven consequences of globalization suggest that economic and moral integration is not indicative of the emergence of a single, globally accepted moral code. Rather than signalling the ‘end of history’ (Fukuyama 1989), critics argue, neoliberal observations about processes of global integration suggest the emergence of particular forms of class formation and new hierarchies of knowledge and power (van de Pijl 1998). Neoliberal assertions about the prospects for human rights are therefore little more than a reflection of particular class interests, not an all-embracing global phenomenon that will eventually bring human rights protection to all people. Expressed cogently by Scholte:

… liberal globalists of the late twentieth century readily fall prey to a naïve optimism, sometimes bordering on the euphoric, that modernity will, almost as a matter of historical inevitability, yield a universal, homogeneous, egalitarian, prosperous and communitarian world society. Yet in practice, globalization has often perpetuated (and in some instances increased) poverty, violence, ecological degradation, estrangement and anomie. [Furthermore], liberal accounts of globalization lack a critical examination of their own terms and the social structures that this mind-set bolsters. Tacitly if not explicitly, liberal orthodoxy treats the market, electoral democracy, growth, national solidarity and scientific reason as timeless virtues with universal applicability. This discourse effectively rules out the possibility that capitalism, individualism, industrialism, consumerism, the nationality principle and rationalism might be causes rather than cures for global problems. (Scholte 1996: 51)

This more pessimistic, critical view of the future of human rights focuses upon the negative aspects of globalization, including mass migrations, refugees, famine, violence, environmental degradation, cultural dissolution and structural deprivation. Pessimists argue that far from strengthening human rights, the practices of globalization may not lead to greater human emancipation, but rather to new forms of repression. For the pessimists, ‘[t]here is no obvious or unambiguous, let alone, necessary, connection between globalization and freedom’ (Scholte 1996: 52). If the project of universal human rights can be further promoted within the context of globalization, then according to the pessimists, we must begin by unmasking the weaknesses and inadequacies of the neoliberal approach so that our hopes are not thwarted and our energies dissipated by undertaking actions that lead to inevitable failure.

This book follows the critical and pessimistic path by attempting to expose some of the more extravagant claims for human rights in the age of globalization. As suggested above, the critical and pessimistic path should be seen as offering an opportunity to contribute to social, economic and political change that will make a lasting contribution to human security and human rights. Given the current configuration of forms of state, global institutions and world order (Cox 1981), the prospect for effecting such changes is severely limited. However, the new social formations that go under the rubric of globalization are not natural phenomena,