Introduction
The Ambivalence of Good
The twentieth century brought state violence and mass killing to a staggering culmination. Two highly industrialized world wars fought with utter destructive will brought a level of devastation beyond anything that could have been imagined to that point. Although Europe was spared military conflict in the decades that followed, other world regions were repeatedly laid waste by wars and civil wars— this affected Indochina and Korea as well as the Middle East, Nigeria, Angola, the Horn of Africa, and Central America. Mass murder of defenceless civilians, often committed in the course of war, came almost to symbolize the century. The murder of the European Jews, the genocides in Armenia, Cambodia, and Rwanda, the massacres in Indonesia, Bangladesh, and the disintegrating Yugoslavia showed quite plainly the extreme destructive fury that could be unleashed by hatred for mostly imagined enemies. At the same time, dictatorial repression took on a new quality. Although the totalitarian projects of the National Socialists, Fascists, and Soviet Communists had either failed or passed their zenith by the middle of the century, political events were shaped by authoritarian regimes in many countries around the world. Countless people were subjected to persecution on grounds of their religion, their ethnicity, or their sex. Unsurprisingly, these violent characteristics still determine historical representation of the century to this day. Almost all interpretations of the period have seen this upheaval as a pivotal element.
However, the twentieth century was also the era which saw an astonishing rise in the notion of human rights. Beginning with the groundbreaking Universal Declaration in 1948, human rights found their way into international agreements, which enshrined them as universal, inviolable standards. Over the following decades, an ever-denser network of national and international institutions developed, consisting of NGOs, human rights commissions, and foreign office departments that monitored states’ compliance with these standards, and raised awareness of breaches. Crucially, numerous politicians, activists, diplomats, and international officials went to considerable effort to make the promise of human rights a reality. They did their utmost to confront government crimes, to help suffering ‘others’, and to make wars less likely. In doing so, they were guided by the hope of creating a better, safer world—a hope that was seldom naive, and generally combined with a sharp eye for political realities.
The Ambivalence of Good
To fully understand the twentieth century, we must consider these twin facets. Both the eruptions of violence and the development of international human rights policy are emblematic of its history. The way in which we elucidate this history, the driving force behind it, its essence and legacies, largely depends on how we relate these two strands to each other. Their correlation is, however, more complicated than it might seem at first glance. The history of human rights may arise from noble motives and a determination to help, yet it cannot simply be seen as the ethically pure and politically liberating flip side of a century of destruction. International human rights standards do not represent the moral lesson drawn unanimously by the international community after 1945 from the wars and genocides that had gone before. Even in later years, human rights initiatives were never an automatic answer to state crimes. Many factors determined whether or not concerted relief efforts would be forthcoming: was there enough information available to arouse attention and demonstrate state repression in such a way that intervention seemed both necessary and useful, and that political support could be mobilized and political resistance overcome? There was no shortage of instances where powerful forces, able to stem oppression and murder, were entirely absent, to which the genocides in Cambodia and Rwanda bear a particularly depressing witness. And even when politicians and activists appealed to human rights to protect others, in the Soviet Union or South Africa, Algeria or Argentina, this was seldom motivated by entirely altruistic ideas. Strategic calculations, political compulsion to act, or self-serving expectations of a political or moral reward would also play their part. International human rights policy does not embody any kind of alternative world order, any kind of inverted mirror image of the Realpolitik that traditionally dominates international affairs. Human rights were woven into the course of the century—into its conflicts and crises, its history of crime and repression, its desire for a better world and outbursts of reform—in many more diverse and ambiguous ways.
My study takes this tension as an intellectual starting point from which to explore how, and to what extent, the discourse and practice of human rights affected international politics in the twentieth century, and its second half in particular. An exhaustive analysis of the history of human rights in the period goes beyond its scope, yet I will consider a range of topic areas that offer important and meaningful insights into that history. The first chapter investigates the background history, that is, the strands in the development of international human rights policy that reach back into the period before 1945. Here, I focus on the experience of the interwar period and on various initiatives that emerged in the early forties— the visions of a post-war order pursued by internationalist groups in the USA, federalists and resistance activists in Europe, and the Catholic Church, as well as the negotiations that led to the establishment of the United Nations. The second chapter deals with the United Nations’ human rights work following the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, taking as examples the discussions around forced labour, freedom of information, and an ‘action programme’ suggested by the USA. The third chapter highlights the historical gap between Western Europe, where a strong formal system of international human rights arose, and Latin America,
where that was not the case. Non-governmental organizations were a decisive force in breathing political life into the discourse around human rights in those years, as is shown in chapter four. The case of the International League for the Rights of Man demonstrates, however, that they never had a great deal of room for manoeuvre in the post-war period. Chapter five turns to the history of decolonization and investigates the role of human rights in anti-colonial discourse, human rights initiatives launched by postcolonial states in the United Nations, and the impact of human rights criticism on the decisions of colonial powers to withdraw from the colonies.
The second part of the book is devoted to new beginnings in human rights policy in the 1970s and traces their development until the end of the following decade. Chapter six investigates the way in which the institutional structure and political activism of the most important non-governmental organization of that era, Amnesty International, took shape and changed, as well as the motivations and political lifestyles that shaped its US members’ involvement. The seventh chapter takes a detailed look at the extent to which Western governments’ (those of the Netherlands, the USA, and Great Britain) turning towards human rights protection was a decisive factor in human rights gaining such an increased status in international politics. It also describes the way in which the conservative governments that came to power in the USA and the Federal Republic of Germany in the early 1980s attempted to turn back the clock on human rights, before ultimately focusing on a conservative redefinition of the idea.
The new clout of international NGOs and increased sensitivity to human rights in Western governments were important reasons for the Chilean military dictatorship under Augusto Pinochet’s becoming the target of unprecedented international protest. Chapter eight analyses the dynamics behind the emergence of these campaigns, the regime’s reactions, and the significance of human rights pressures in the junta’s decision to abandon power. Chapter nine turns our attention to Eastern Europe. It shows the way in which dissident movements in the seventies made human rights a cipher for ideological, political, and tactical reorientation, even though this process unfolded very differently in different countries. At the same time, it demonstrates the way in which the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) changed the preconditions for diplomatic exchanges between East and West, and investigates the role played by human rights in the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe. Finally, chapter ten traces the hugely altered significance of human rights for African and Asian states following independence. On one hand, postcolonial governments found themselves facing a new kind of criticism, while on the other, a regional human rights system developed, and intellectuals were able to construct a genuinely African tradition of human rights.
In every chapter, I consider the development of human rights policy in three dimensions. The first is concerned with the question of genesis. I look into the historical experiences, political motivations, and perceptions on the basis of which politicians or activists took up the idea of human rights and got developments off the ground in this area. This also includes the ways in which they fleshed the idea
The Ambivalence of Good
out in any given case, and the political aims with which they implemented it. Moreover, my analysis focuses heavily on the practice of human rights policy. It was this practice which largely determined the power, and at times even the very substance, of human rights.
I therefore look closely at the development of proceedings within intergovernmental organizations, how NGOs operated, how human rights percolated into foreign policy decision-making, the dynamics which sparked public mobilization, and the unfolding of human rights conflicts.
Finally, I attempt to tease out and evaluate the effects of initiatives undertaken in the name of human rights. Interestingly, most historians of human rights have thus far steered clear of such questions of impact. Yet they are precisely the ones that historians should be asking in any attempt to measure the power that human rights have had to transform international politics. In order to relate these three perspectives to each other, I consider international human rights policy as a field consisting of a multitude of organizations and institutions, an abundance of state and non-state players all in communication with each other, and of certain forums—particularly the United Nations—in which discussions and conflicts could be brought together. The emergence and transformation of this political field provide the conceptual framework for my study.
The book draws heavily on, and attempts to synthesize, historical literature and published sources. It is, however, predominantly based on my research in numerous archives throughout five countries. These, with the exception of Chile, are Western nations, yet this statement demonstrates in itself the imprecision of this classification. In different periods and policy areas, Chile has been classed variously as part of the Western camp, or as a ‘developing country’ in the Global South, and even as both at once. I did not carry out any archive research in Eastern Europe, Africa, or Asia for practical reasons. Developments in these regions are very significant for the global history of human rights and thus central to my investigation. Yet it is inevitable, on balance, that my findings in this area have less depth of focus. Nonetheless, this study takes a twofold approach. It aims to unfold an overarching interpretation of international human rights policy in the latter half of the twentieth century. At the same time, it also seeks to generate empirical knowledge of important aspects and expressions of this policy, and thus to break new historical ground.
The literature on human rights has not, to date, produced a research-based, synthetic study of this kind. That said, our knowledge of the history of human rights in this period has made impressive progress in recent years.1 The first wave
1 Cf. as the worldwide first research-based overview of international human rights policy since 1945: Eckel, ‘Utopie der Moral, Kalkül der Macht. Menschenrechte in der globalen Politik nach 1945’. The earliest inspiration for empirically based research into human rights policy in the latter half of the century was provided by the late Kenneth Cmiel. Cf., for example, Cmiel, ‘The Recent Historiography of Human Rights’. In American Historical Review 109 (2004), pp. 117–35. Lynn Hunt’s book, Inventing Human Rights. A History (New York and London, 2017), was also influential. For more recent research essays see also Devin O. Pendas, ‘Toward a New Politics? On the Recent Historiography of Human Rights’. In Contemporary European History 21 (2012), pp. 95–111; Samuel Moyn, ‘Substance, Scale, and Salience. The Recent Historiography of Human Rights’. In Annual
of historical scholarship, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, tended to be sweeping in scope but often presented only a roughly elaborated overview; this has given way to a second phase of more narrowly focused investigations with a sound empirical basis.2 Human rights history remains a fast-moving field. A series of enlightening studies have appeared even since this book was first published in its original German version, in 2014.3
Historians have differed markedly on the overall significance of human rights in twentieth-century history. There are three predominant narratives that appear in the literature. The first authors to write on the history of human rights mostly understood that history as a uniform and continuous development, spanning decades or even centuries.4 Some framed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as the beginning of a ‘human rights revolution’, which subsequently proliferated ever more strongly. The search for continuities in the history of human rights is undoubtedly important, and it makes sense to ask whether there might in fact always have been some kind of idea of human rights, which might have gone by other names yet remained unchanged in its essential nature. In this strand of studies, however, changes over time, differences in practice and rationale, and cultural variations have fared badly. Moreover, the authors have tended to take an unquestioningly positive view of human rights. As a result, they have evened out the contradictory claims formulated in the name of human rights, and often disregarded ruptures in political implementation. In fact, this first narrative itself now appears in a historical light. It dates back to the late nineties, when human rights policy was flourishing around the world. Some authors were evidently working at ‘inventing traditions’ in an attempt to provide a longstanding backstory for the boom they were then experiencing, which they understood in optimistic terms.
Review of Law and Social Science 8 (2012), pp. 123–40; Philip Alston, ‘Does the Past Matter? On the Origins of Human Rights’. In Harvard Law Review 126 (2013), pp. 2043–81.
2 For an early longitudinal view see especially Lauren, The Evolution of International Human Rights; Ishay, The History of Human Rights. From Ancient Times to the Globalization Era. Various anthologies give a good overview of the new wave of research. Cf. Paul Hoffmann (ed.), Human Rights in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, UK, 2010); Akira Iriye, Petra Goedde, and William Hitchcock (eds), Human Rights Revolution. An International History (New York, 2012); Jan Eckel and Samuel Moyn (eds), The Breakthrough. Human Rights in the 1970s (Philadelphia, PA, 2013); Norbert Frei and Anette Weinke, Toward a New Moral World Order? Menschenrechtspolitik und Völkerrecht seit 1945 (Göttingen, 2013).
3 For monographical studies see e.g. Barbara J. Keys, Reclaiming American Virtue. The Human Rights Revolution of the 1970s (Cambridge, MA, 2014); Christopher N. J. Roberts, The Contentious History of the International Bill of Human Rights (Cambridge, UK, 2015); Daniel J. Sargent, A Superpower Transformed. The Remaking of American Foreign Relations in the 1970s (Oxford and New York, 2015); Steven Jensen, The Making of International Human Rights. The 1960s, Decolonization, and the Reconstruction of Global Values (Cambridge, UK, 2016); Mark Philipp Bradley, The World Reimagined. Americans and Human Rights in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, UK, 2016); Nathaniel A. Kurz, A Sphere above the Nations? The Rise and Fall of International Jewish Human Rights Politics, Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University (2015); Patrick William Kelly, Sovereign Emergencies. Latin America and the Making of Global Human Rights Politics, Ph.D. dissertation, University of Chicago (2016).
4 Cf. Paul Gordon Lauren, The Evolution of International Human Rights (Philadelphia, PA, 2003); Micheline R. Ishay, The History of Human Rights. From Ancient Times to the Globalization Era (Berkeley, CA, 2004); William Korey, NGOs and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. ‘A Curious Grapevine’ (New York, 1998); Paul Kennedy, Parlament der Menschheit. Die Vereinten Nationen und der Weg zur Weltregierung (Munich, 2007).
Another, less-developed strand of interpretation emphasizes the inconsistencies and the moral hypocrisy that cast doubt on the human rights policy of Western figures. These historians focus particularly, but not exclusively, on the American government.5 They display a highly critical attitude that seems legitimate in political terms but sometimes comes at the expense of historical distance. Indeed, many of the arguments formulated by proponents of this view can be found in discussions from the time. Perhaps more importantly, their perspective falls short in certain regards. The fact that politicians and activists have made use of the idea of human rights to create a noble self-image and to disguise ambitions for power, and that in so doing they often failed to improve living conditions in other countries, has had a profound impact on human rights policy. Yet it characterized both Western policy and that of other states and organizations. And it was rare for that to be their sole concern. Their motivations and uses were almost always multilayered and fraught with tension, and those involved at the time reflected more deeply on their actions than historical critics sometimes give them credit for.
A third narrative consists of stories of origins. They highlight a particular historical moment—generally associated with a certain group of key players or particular sets of events—during which they claim that the ideological, political, or emotional essence of human rights emerged. Historians have identified such origins even before the twentieth century—for example in the French Revolution, abolitionism, or nineteenth-century humanitarian interventions.6 For other authors, by contrast, the decisive step seemed to have been taken in the years following the Second World War. In their view, it was at that time that visionary international law pioneers and their work towards international standards of human rights, especially in the form of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, laid the foundations upon which the entire human rights policy of subsequent decades would unfold.7 Moreover, various events in the decolonization years were interpreted as decisive foundation histories, latterly, for example, in the discussion advanced by states of the Global South around the condemnation of
5 Cf. Kirsten Sellars, The Rise and Rise of Human Rights (Stroud, 2002); and the work of Barbara Keys and Bradley Simpson.
6 Cf. Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights. A History (New York and London, 2007); Jenny S. Martínez, The Slave Trade and the Origins of International Human Rights Law (Oxford, 2012); Gary J. Bass, Freedom’s Battle. The Origins of Humanitarian Intervention (New York, 2008); Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost. A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa (Boston, MA, and New York, 1998).
7 Cf. Johannes Morsink, The Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Origins, Drafting and Intent (Philadelphia, PA, 1999); Ann Mary Glendon, A World Made New. Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (New York, 2001); Bradley A. W. Simpson, Human Rights and the End of Empire. Britain and the Genesis of the European Convention (Oxford, 2001); Mark Mazower, ‘The Strange Triumph of Human Rights 1933–1950’. In The Historical Journal 47 (2004), pp. 379–99; Elizabeth Borgwardt, A New Deal for the World. America’s Vision for Human Rights (Cambridge, MA, and London, 2005); Jay M. Winter, Dreams of Peace and Freedom. Utopian Moments in the Twentieth Century (New Haven, CT, 2006); idem and Antoine Prost, René Cassin and Human Rights. From the Great War to the Universal Declaration (Cambridge, UK, 2013); Roger Normand and Sarah Zaidi, Human Rights at the UN. The Political History of Universal Justice (Bloomington, IN, and Indianapolis, 2008).
racial discrimination and the commitment to religious tolerance.8 Furthermore, there has already been discussion of the 1990s as the period when the ‘real’ idea and practice of human rights originated; this can be seen in a sense as closing the circle, given that this was also the decade in which more recent human rights scholarship itself originated.9 The most influential interpretation of this kind, meanwhile, was put forward by Samuel Moyn, in whose view the 1970s were the period when the modern idea of human rights arose so astonishingly.10 It was during these years, Moyn argues, that human rights replaced older, utopian political projects, which collapsed in the political turmoil of that decade, translating them into a new, substantially more muted expression of idealism—into the ‘last utopia’ that remained.
This scholarly reflection on the genesis of human rights has absorbed by far the most part of intellectual energy to date, unleashing considerable controversy in the process. Given that this is a young field of research, the concentration on matters of periodization is understandable; these have indeed endowed the debate with a relatively high degree of coherence. All the same, the endeavour to discover the one historical ‘breakthrough’ has sometimes been conducted with such dogged determination that it begins to resemble a quest for the Holy Grail—possibly successful in legend, yet undoubtedly unsatisfactory as a model for historical scholarship.11 It can hardly be helpful in achieving a nuanced historical understanding to declare single episodes and isolated snippets the key to explaining the entire history of human rights, playing off various decades and actors against one another. Research of this kind, much of it removed from archival evidence, is more likely to produce an inflation of origins, decisive turning points, formative moments, groundbreaking new developments, and ultimately also teleological points of culmination.
This book, therefore, adopts a more comprehensive perspective in terms of both time and space, with the aim of examining an array of historical developments and relating them to one another. Viewed from such an angle, a policy field—albeit limited in character—began to emerge in the 1940s. I therefore
8 Such as Jensen’s study Making. See also Roland Burke, Decolonization and the Evolution of International Human Rights (Philadelphia, PA, 2010); Meredith Terretta, ‘ “We Had Been Fooled into Thinking that the UN Watches over the Entire World”. Human Rights, UN Trust Territories, and Africa’s Decolonization’. In HRQ 34 (2012), pp. 329–60.
9 Cf. Hoffmann, ‘Rights’ and for discussion Samuel Moyn, ‘The End of Human Rights History’. In Past and Present 233 (2016), pp. 307–22; Lynn Hunt, ‘The Long and the Short of the History of Human Rights’. In Past and Present 233 (2016), pp. 323–31.
10 Cf. Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia. Human Rights in History (Cambridge, MA, and London, 2010); idem, Human Rights and the Uses of History (London, 2014). See also Eckel and Moyn (eds), Breakthrough; Keys, Virtue. The first to highlight the importance of the 1970s (with a view to American history) was Kenneth Cmiel, ‘The Emergence of Human Rights Politics in the United States’. In Journal of American History 86 (1999), pp. 1231–50.
11 Cf. Mark Philipp Bradley, ‘American Vernaculars. The United States and the Global Human Rights Imagination’. In Diplomatic History 38 (2014), pp. 1–24, who feels reminded of ‘take-no-prisoners competitive sweepstakes’ (p. 4), as well as Robert Brier, ‘Beyond the Quest for a “Breakthrough”. Reflections on the Recent Historiography on Human Rights’. In Jahrbuch für europäische Geschichte 16 (2015), pp. 155–74.
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consider the seventies not as the beginning of human rights policy, but as a time of transformation—although one that marked a crucial turning point, producing substantial shifts.12 I share the opinion that political disillusionment was an important reason for the widespread attractiveness of the idea of human rights in that decade. But I see it as only one reason among many, and do not believe that every important development of the decade can be traced back to it. In all this, the question of origins can deliver only partial explanations, especially when conceived, as by Samuel Moyn, purely in terms of the history of ideas. This is another reason why I consider it necessary to expand the focus to include the forms and effects of human rights policy.
Considering that human rights policy since the forties has developed during a phase of rapid historical change, and has involved a multitude of players acting within an incredibly diverse range of parameters, it seems impossible from the outset to fit this development into a linear, one-dimensional, or even morally unequivocal narrative. We can clearly not tell a story of unbroken progress. Likewise, these processes cannot be entirely subsumed either into a politico-historical criticism of Western hypocrisy or into the stalled attempts at emancipation from the Global South, or even into the loss of utopia in the 1970s. By the same token, the unexpected successes emanating from the soft power of moral politics represent only one facet of the history, as do those instances when rebellions or interventions in the name of universal principles proved futile. Looking at it from the other extreme, however, it would be equally unhelpful to consider events as entirely disparate and to fragment them into unconnected historical episodes. Human rights as a policy area was too internally coherent to do so, and the connections that the global discourse on human rights created between different actors and world regions were too close.
This book attempts to steer a course between these extremes by developing three fundamental lines of interpretation. First, as already suggested, I narrate the history of human rights as a fractured and discontinuous process. This does not imply that I discard all traditions and interpret every new approach to the idea as a radical innovation. I do, however, aim to demonstrate the very different ways in which the notion of human rights and its political implementation could be shaped over the course of time. Likewise, I stress throughout that short-term causes, and occasionally also immediate triggers, had a more significant impact on the implementation of human rights policy than distant historical roots or long-term continuities that may also have existed.
Viewed from this angle, the twentieth century presents several moments when human rights received injections of vital energy. This applied initially to the years around the end of the Second World War. In this phase, the strongest catalyst lay
12 For my interpretation of the 1970s see Jan Eckel, ‘Utopie der Moral, Kalkül der Macht. Menschenrechte in der globalen Politik nach 1945’. In Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 49 (2009), pp. 437–84, here pp. 458–82; idem, ‘Humanitarisierung der internationalen Beziehungen? Menschenrechtspolitik in den 1970er Jahren’. In Geschichte und Gesellschaft 38 (2012), pp. 603–35; idem, ‘The Rebirth of Politics from the Spirit of Morality: Explaining the Human Rights Revolution of the 1970s’. In Breakthrough, edited by idem and Moyn (Philadelphia, PA, 2013), pp. 226–60.
in the fact that protecting human rights appeared to offer a guarantee of effective international security structures. The danger posed to international coexistence by fascist and militaristic regimes’ resolute will to war should in future be nipped in the bud by preventing any determined political leadership from ever being able to exert total dominance over its own population. The most important result of this line of thought was that human rights took root in international politics, and more precisely in intergovernmental organizations. The transformative effect of these new beginnings in international politics remained limited, however. Work in the United Nations stagnated and the Council of Europe’s human rights system went unused. Numerous non-governmental organizations turned away from the new bodies in frustration. The history of human rights policy in the forties and fifties was, to a great extent, the history of a creeping disenchantment, of waiting for a transformation in international politics that was not forthcoming.
Decolonization gave international human rights policy a more limited boost, yet also had more mixed results. On one hand, many political elites in the colonies also rejected the declarations of human rights and procedural opportunities offered by the United Nations, sometimes out of disillusionment, and sometimes out of fundamental scepticism. On the other hand, the coalition of African and Asian states did largely manage to link the United Nations’ human rights work to the fight against colonial rule, apartheid, and racial discrimination. In this way, they established a symbolic order in the global organization that turned prevailing power relationships in international politics upside down. This represented a significant triumph for independence movements and postcolonial governments, even if human rights outside the United Nations were of fluctuating and often somewhat incidental importance in the pursuit of national independence.
In the seventies and eighties, human rights attained greater prominence than ever before in international politics. This flowed from a multifaceted shift whose greatest common factor lay in the fact that human rights developed into a multifunctional promise of moral renewal. They would revitalize politics in a variety of situations, both ideologically, as a general principle and an aspiration, and strategically, in concrete political practice. This vision was centred on a sober, minimalist project for making the world a better place, a rejection of the Manichean thinking of the Cold War, the moralization of political action, and the idea of what might be called an apolitical politics, that would transcend all rival camps and social dividing lines.
In this phase, as in the forties and fifties, a number of particularly outspoken attempts at reform went awry. The Eastern European dissident movement was soon crushed in most countries. British and Dutch human rights policy achieved no particular breakthroughs, and observers inside and outside the United States agreed almost unanimously that Jimmy Carter’s policy had failed, and had done so in style. Over the years, the Chilean dictatorship and the South African apartheid regime proved resistant to external criticism. Even so, human rights initiatives now began to fundamentally, yet often subtly, transform international relations. There was a sudden and irreversible rise in sensitivity to human rights issues in the public realm. From now on, human rights would form an issue in its own right in state
The Ambivalence of Good relations, put down firm institutional roots, and become almost axiomatic in international politics. This also improved the prospects of government crimes being internationally shunned and politically combated. The late eighties were particularly decisive in this process, and this book emphasizes their significance. Amnesty International acquired greater influence than ever before. Moreover, in Western states, commitment to human rights had—for the first time—become a matter of cross-party political consensus and was no longer contested in principle. Finally, criticism on human rights grounds played an important supporting role in the process of democratizing dictatorships towards the end of the decade. This held true, in varying ways and to varying extents, in Chile, South Africa, and the Soviet Union alike.
Secondly, this book depicts a polycentric development in international human rights policy with contributions from a range of players in various places, whether they sought to help others or to protect themselves.13 They thereby attached a wide range of sometimes contradictory meanings to the term over the decades. During the Second World War, Jewish organizations approached the notion of human rights out of their experience of religious and racist persecution, while American internationalists considered it from the perspective of aggression by radical dictatorships that had plunged the world into war. Federalists in Europe, and Catholic clergy, aimed to protect the dignity of the human person within the framework of the nation state. Soon after the Second World War, dozens of states began to shape notions of human rights within the United Nations, doing so from diverse national legal traditions and foreign policy interests. At around the same time, the members of the Council of Europe made human rights an essential part of the consensus of values to which they aspired. These were strongly anti-communist and had a markedly conservative tone. Subsequently, nationalist leaders in the colonies, and representatives of postcolonial governments, also began to make use of human rights principles, extending them to denounce the colonial powers. In so doing, they associated them with the fight against racial discrimination and colonial repression.
This array of understandings continued over the following decades. In the 1970s, activists in Latin America and Eastern Europe made human rights a highly charged symbolic language with which to signify internal opposition to dictatorships. They were far less concerned with the political philosophy of human rights than with forging an, often literally, existential strategy of self-defence. In Western countries meanwhile, a new protest movement elevated human rights to symbolize a global commitment to suffering individuals. By the same token, they used them to criticize what they saw as Western governments’ lack of moral sensitivity in foreign policy. Similar motivations also inspired some governments to make human rights protection an important foreign policy aim. United States president Jimmy Carter pursued this as a means of overcoming a foreign policy that had led to war and moral bankruptcy. The Dutch government, by contrast, used human rights for a new-leftist reshaping of international relations. The states making up the European
13 This interpretation is supported by recent monographic works, which confirm the polycentric pattern from their own particular perspectives. Cf. Kurz, Sphere; Kelly, Emergencies
Community had already ensured that human rights formed an important political stake in the CSCE process. Yet they all understood the idea differently, with some seeing in it a complement to détente, while others aimed at a long-term undermining of the ‘Eastern Bloc’. Furthermore, African and Asian governments also drew on the idea of human rights during this period. They, however, sought to use it to back up their call for redistributing global economic resources. Finally, the eighties also saw an attempt by Western governments, such as those of Ronald Reagan in the USA or Helmut Kohl in the Federal Republic of Germany, to give a conservative substance to human rights-based foreign policy. To do so, they further accentuated the anti-communist slant but also developed a definition of peace that was inextricably linked with liberal democracy—to make it clear in the heated discussions of the ‘Second Cold War’ that no peaceful order was to be had on communist terms. Consequently, in every period and in any given situation, events in international human rights policy were determined by an array of factors, and could never be reduced to a single cause.
Thirdly and lastly, this study emphasizes the ambivalence of human rights policy. Initiatives launched in the name of human rights have always had many layers of motivation. Truly humanitarian concern has rarely been the only underlying issue; at times it has played no role at all. When, in the late forties, the American government began a propaganda campaign against forced labour in the Soviet Union, it may have benefited the detainees. American decision-makers, however, were more concerned with discrediting the communist system. Non-governmental organizations lobbied the United Nations for universal standards, but often drew them up with an eye to the groups they represented. When the states in the Council of Europe threatened the Greek military government with expulsion, they wanted to do something about the lack of political freedom in the country, but also cleared a path for putting relations with Greece back on a viable footing outside the Council. Campaigns against the military regime in Chile in turn demonstrate that criticism of state-sponsored violence on human rights grounds could also be linked to many other, heterogeneous concerns—the most important being the left-wing fight against political opponents they considered ‘fascist’. A distinctly self-referential element often came to the fore in this plurality of motivations. In the seventies, activists from Amnesty International were concerned with moderating the suffering of prisoners in distant countries, but also with documenting their own morality. These multiple meanings were an important reason why, when put into practice, human rights policy resulted in profound dilemmas and contradictions. Far from being an exclusively moral vision, it was very often more of a tactical resource in political confrontations. Most member states in the Council of Europe did not want a strong protective system, which would perceptibly limit national sovereignty, yet they entered into it nonetheless for purposes of political communitization. Thus, they engendered the inherent absurdity of the European human rights system: it was intended to secure the overarching community of values yet, if used, it risked destroying that same community as members engaged in bitter criticism of each other. In Latin America, while fear of external interference initially hindered the creation of an international human rights system, it subsequently became the
The Ambivalence of Good grounds for actually establishing one in the revolutionary and counterrevolutionary upheaval after the Cuban Revolution. Anti-colonial notions of human rights, for their part, fluctuated between rejecting a supposedly hypocritical promise made by colonial powers and adopting human rights ideas for the struggle against foreign rule. The direction in which they turned often depended on the specific circumstances in which key players could use the idea. This ambivalence was perpetuated in the postcolonial human rights discourse of the Global South. African politicians and intellectuals rejected existing international standards of human rights because they considered them a product of an alien ‘Western’ history. Yet at the same time, they continued to draw upon the idea of human rights itself, not least to bolster their claim for a fair world economic order. The political practice even of Amnesty International was characterized by a series of inherent tensions. The London-based organization was extremely efficient at attracting international attention, yet it often dramatized and decontextualized political events. At the same time, Amnesty’s commitment to human rights inaugurated a new global mission. That also held true for Western governments: meddling while invoking apparently universal principles became an essential characteristic of their human rights policy. And all the actors had to grapple with the not infrequent unintended consequences of humanitarian campaigns. Dissidents befriended by international human rights NGOs might find themselves placed more firmly in the firing line of state persecution. And while dictatorships, such as that in Chile, sometimes reacted to criticism by freeing prisoners, they might also respond by further turning the screws of repression.
Given all of the above, the development of human rights policy is particularly unsuited to producing a grand narrative. It is too hard to pin down to particular places or personalities, and too changeable and contradictory. It is more a case of offering medium-range historical explanations, some of which fit together, forming overarching patterns of interpretation, while others resist an overly coherent reading. The resulting picture is of a century marked by fractured transformation. Nonetheless—or maybe precisely because of this—the history of human rights enables us to open up important facets of international politics in this era and to shed new light on more general questions prompted by historical research in recent years. Thus, human rights constitute an important element in the transformation of political language in the decades after the Second World War—including, but not limited to, that of democracy.14 Moreover, human rights policy clearly demonstrates that it was possible for non-state players, such as intergovernmental organizations and, above all, transnational NGOs and social movements, to decisively shape international relations—even though their dedication came up against insurmountable barriers, as often as not.15 This history also opens up a
14 For further context see Jan-Werner Müller, Contesting Democracy. Political Ideas in TwentiethCentury Europe (New Haven, CT, 2011).
15 On the general role of NGOs in international politics see: Akira Iriye, Global Community. The Role of International Organizations in the Making of the Contemporary World (Berkeley, CA, 2002); Jeremy Suri, ‘Non-Governmental Organizations and Non-State Actors’. In Palgrave Advances in International History, edited by Patrick Finney (Basingstoke, 2005), pp. 223–46; Thomas Davies, NGOs. A New History of Transnational Civil Society (London, 2013).
specific viewpoint on the larger global conflicts in the period. It refines existing reflection on the place of the Cold War in international politics by attesting to the great formative power of this clash between systems, which also appropriated the language of human rights, while simultaneously revealing the reasons for the erosion of this formative power in the seventies and eighties.16 At the same time, the field of human rights policy strikingly reveals the extent to which decolonization altered the international order and conflicting interests between the global north and the postcolonial Global South were able to shape the geopolitical arena. Lastly, the dynamics of human rights policy are particularly suited as part of the effort to contribute to an understanding of the upheaval of the 1970s, so widely discussed in recent years, precisely by pointing out that, in many cases, the longterm effects of the decade’s new beginnings were not felt until ten years later.17
This study is a heavily abridged version of my book Die Ambivalenz des Guten [The Ambivalence of the Good], published in German in 2014. I have attempted to incorporate more recent literature where there seemed to be a close link to the subject-matter under discussion. In doing so, I have concentrated on highlighting areas where new fields of knowledge have been opened up and where my findings tally with newer conclusions and positions, or where they diverge from them. I have not changed the arguments underlying my book.
It is once again a great pleasure and joy to offer my thanks to the many colleagues who have supported and nurtured this book along its way. The book owes a great deal to many years of intellectual discussion with and encouragement of all kinds from my colleagues in Freiburg: Ulrich Herbert, Hans Joas, Jörn Leonhard, Arvid Schors, Thomas Zimmer, Patrick Wagner, as well as Norbert Frei (Jena). During and after my work on the book, numerous colleagues allowed me to present and discuss my ideas, read parts of the text, or entered into conversations from which I learnt a great deal. Many thanks for this help to Arnd Bauerkämper, Stefan Berger, Frank Bösch, Kathleen Canning, Kim Christiaens, Eckart Conze, Anselm DoeringManteuffel, Geoff Eley, Camilo Erlichman, Jörg Fisch, Isabel Heinemann, Dirk van Laak, Sonja Levsen, Lutz Niethammer, Paul Nolte, Jürgen Osterhammel, Joachim von Puttkamer, Lutz Raphael, Sven Reichardt, Martin Sabrow, Philipp Sarasin, Stephan Scheuzger, Axel Schildt, Dirk Schumann, Detlef Siegfried, Dietmar Süß, Willibald Steinmetz, Jakob Tanner, Petra Terhoeven, Cornelius Torp, and Bernd Weisbrod, as well as members of the study group on Human Rights in the 20th Century at the Fritz Thyssen Stiftung.
16 On reclassifying the place of the Cold War in international politics see: Melvyn Leffler and Odd Arne Westad (eds), The Cambridge History of the Cold War, 3 volumes (Cambridge, 2010); Richard H. Immerman and Petra Goedde (eds), The Oxford Handbook of the Cold War (Oxford, 2013).
17 For discussion of the 1970s, see: Anselm Doering-Manteuffel and Lutz Raphael, Nach dem Boom. Perspektiven auf die Zeitgeschichte seit 1970 (Göttingen, 2008); Niall Ferguson et al. (eds), The Shock of the Global. The 1970s in Perspective (Cambridge, MA, and London, 2010); Thomas Borstelman, The 1970s. A New Global History from Civil Rights to Economic Inequality (Princeton, NJ, 2012); Daniel Rodgers, Age of Fracture (Cambridge, MA, 2011); Christan Caryl, Strange Rebels. 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century (New York, 2014); Anselm Doering-Manteuffel, Lutz Raphael, and Thomas Schlemmer (eds), Vorgeschichte der Gegenwart. Dimensionen des Strukturbruchs nach dem Boom (Göttingen, 2016).
The
Ambivalence of Good
I am grateful to the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft for a research grant that enabled me to spend a year at Columbia University in New York. Mark Mazower’s intellectual support for the project was as great a stroke of luck for my research as my intense, inspiring, and productively controversial dialogue with Samuel Moyn. I also owe much to my conversations with Volker Berghahn, Greg Mann, and Susan Pedersen. This, of course, also holds true for the colleagues who have breathed such life into the field of the history of human rights in recent years; contact and encounters with them made work on the book into a perennial, polyphonic, and richly rewarding conversation. Special thanks, then, go to Carl J. Bon Tempo, Mark Philipp Bradley, Robert Brier, Gunter Dehnert, Celia Donert, Benjamin Gilde, Michal Givoni, Lasse Heerten, Veronika Heyde, Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann, Steven Jensen, Patrick Kelly, Ara Keys, Benjamin Nathans, Jean Quartaert, Ned Richardson-Little, Daniel Sargent, Brad Simpson, Lynsay Skiba, Sarah Snyder, Simon Stevens, and Eric Weitz. I would also like to thank my research assistants in Freiburg, Jena, Tübingen, and Cologne for their invaluable, precise, and reliable assistance in both research and editorial work: Eva Bucher, Sebastian Fahner, Isabel Flory, Sonja Friese, Rebekka Großmann, Cosima Götz, Almut Holzem, Anastasiya Kazhan, Sven Löhr, Noemi Moosmann, Nikel Weis, Valerie Schaab, Hannes Schweikardt, Milena Strümper, Claudio Stumpf, Sara Weydner, Julian Zeller, and Insa von Zeppelin. I am very happy to have found a congenial translator in Rachel Ward. Finally, the book has greatly benefited from the excellent cooperation with and generous support from Richard Faber and Cathryn Steele at Oxford University Press.
