Spring 1995
American Purpose
Issue 1, Volume 9

Publication Date: March 1, 1995
Posted: Wednesday, March 3, 1995

On February 13-14,1995, the Ethics and Public Policy Center, the Institute for European Defence and Strategic Studies, the Institute of United States Studies at the University of London, and the Social Affairs Unit co-sponsored an international conference entitled "Learning the Limits: The Politics and Priorities of the United Nations in the New World Order." The conference, held at Senate House, University of London, featured papers by such scholars and publicists as Jeremy Rabkin of Cornell, Mark Almond of Oriel College, Oxford, Anne Applebaum of the London Spectator, and John Bolton, former U.S. assistant secretary of state for international organization affairs.  My paper, which appears in full here, brought together new material on two forthcoming U.N. meetings (the "Social Summit," to be held in Copenhagen in March, and the Fourth International Conference on Women, to be held in Beijing in September), along with themes from essays of mine in the February 1995 issues of Commentary ("Are Human Rights Stilt Universal?") and First Things ("What Really Happened at Cairo"). [G.W.]


In This Issue :

Human Rights and the United Nations
The Case for Starting Over Again
It has been muddled by the academicians, coarsened by the politicians, corrupted by the international sans-culotterie, and debased by dictators of various ideological hues. And yet for all that, the idea of "universal and inalienable human rights" has been one of the great and positive moral forces shaping world politics in the twentieth century—a human achievement that should give us some comfort at the end of a century whose most distinctive political hallmarks have been Auschwitz and the Gulag archipelago.  [More]

Mrs. Roosevelt's Confusions, Revisited
In all of this, there are welcome signs of progress in what Winston Churchill once called "the hard march of man." But there is also a great paradox. For these successes "on the ground" have been paralleled by a continuing distortion of the concept of "universal and inalienable human rights" in international public life. And in that process of distortion, the United Nations has played a pernicious role for many years.  [More]

The Socialist Left Meets the Lifestyle Left
"Ever has it been thus," veteran U.N.-watchers may be thinking. But there does seem to be something new, or at least intensified. The Copenhagen Declaration's commitment to "full gender equity and equality" (never defined, it need hardly be said), the Copenhagen Programme of Action's commitment to "improving the status of the single parent in society," and the Beijing Draft Platform for Action's description of motherhood and homemaking as "interruptions [presumably of the real business of life] for caring responsibilities" (platform item #73) are three indicators of a particularly virulent new strain in the U.N. human rights "system." The themes of this new attack on the classic concept of "universal and inalienable human rights" were on full display in the debates leading up to the September 1994 Cairo International Conference on Population and Development.  [More]

The End of the Conversation?
Meanwhile, as this truly striking example of "cultural imperialism" unfolds throughout the U.N. system, the idea of "universal and inalienable human rights" is under new attack, and precisely on grounds of "cultural imperialism," from activist Muslims, East Asian neo-Confucians and despots, and the remaining Communist states (among which is, of course, the world's largest country, the People's Republic of China).  [More]

Back to Square One
What can be done about these threats to the classic Anglo-American understanding of "universal and inalienable human rights"—which is to say, to the political morality that was instrumental in the defeat of Nazism and Communism?  [More]

Endnotes
Click here to view the endnotes. [More]