July - August 1993
American Purpose
Issue 6, Volume 7

Publication Date: August 1, 1993
Posted: Sunday, August 8, 1993

This issue includes 'The New Human Rights Debate'; 'A Troublesome Declaration'; 'An American Argument, a European Revolution'; 'Back to Square One'; 'The Bangkok Conspirators'; 'Getting It Less-Than-Half Right'; 'The Vienna Declaration'; 'The Dogs That Didn't Bark'; 'The Indictment'; 'Boondoggles'; and 'The Necessity of Hardball'.


In This Issue :

The New Human Rights Debate
In spite of, or perhaps because of, the horrors of the twentieth century, the cause of "human rights" has become one of the most powerful forces in contemporary world politics. The evidence for this is not only to be found in decent societies with a long record of protecting civil rights and political freedoms, or in the recent triumphs of human rights activists in Solidarity and Charter 77. Even more compelling proof lies in the tribute that vice pays to virtue: in the fact that virtually every tyranny in the world today tries to justify its repressions in the name of an "alternative" understanding of "human rights."  [More]

A Troublesome Declaration
That staying power derived in part from the follies committed by Eleanor Roosevelt when she led the drafting of the United Nations' 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the basic international legal text on the subject. While the Universal Declaration does give priority to civil rights and political freedoms, it also uses the language of "rights" to describe a vast array of social and economic desiderata, such as jobs, health care, and education. The historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., once described the politics of the Declaration in these terms: "The Universal Declaration of Human Rights included both 'civil and political' rights and 'economic, social, and cultural rights,' the second category designed to please states that denied their subjects the first." This is, perhaps, too charitable an interpretation of the role of Mrs. Roosevelt, who was not unsympathetic to the idea that social and economic goods should be considered "rights."  [More]

An American Argument, a European Revolution
These definitional arguments—and the ways in which they were manipulated by dictators of all stripes (but pre-eminently by Communists and their Western apologists)—shaped the foreign-policy debate in the United States for a generation. In the 1976 presidential primaries, Senator Henry M. Jackson of Washington, in a challenge to the detente policies of Henry Kissinger, argued that the classic American conception of civil rights and political freedoms had universal applicability and ought to be a central concern of U.S. foreign policy. Jimmy Carter picked up the theme, but once he was in office he distorted it badly: the human rights bureau in the Carter State Department not only argued for "economic, social, and cultural rights" but seemed to give them priority over civil rights and political freedoms. Moreover, the Carter team showed too little interest in how human rights are institutionalized in societies: which is to say, the Carterites paid very little attention to the linkage between human rights and democracy.  [More]

Back to Square One
The Revolution of 1989 and its twin, the New Russian Revolution of 1991, might have been thought to have settled debates about "human rights." These non-violent revolutions embodied the priority of civil rights and political freedoms: they were revolutions against regimes that located no small part of their legitimacy in their provision of "economic, social, and cultural rights." The truth, of course, was that there were no "rights," economic, cultural, civil, or otherwise, in Communist societies. Jobs, educational opportunities, and health care were linked to political conformity; literature and art were rigorously policed; and the ubiquity of the secret police gave the lie to any notion of enforceable "civil rights." After the 1989 and 1991 upheavals, it should have been perfectly clear that regimes defending their records on the basis of "alternative" conceptions of human rights were to be viewed with the greatest skepticism.  [More]

The Bangkok Conspirators
The bad guys at Vienna were not exactly shy about what they were up to. Two months before the Vienna conference got under way, they blatantly telegraphed their punch.  [More]

Getting It Less-Than-Half Right
The Bangkok Declaration was, among other things, a gauntlet thrown down before the Clinton administration. The Vienna Conference would be the first major international human rights meeting in which the new administration participated; how would the new kids on the block react?  [More]

The Vienna Declaration
The Vienna Declaration of the World Conference on Human Rights is not reading material for the faint of heart or the stylistically squeamish. Thirty-three densely packed pages of rhetoric—divided into the standard "preambular" ("Considering . . . ; recognizing . . . reaffirming . . . emphasizing . . ." etc., etc.), a thirteen-page statement of principles, and a sixteen-page "action plan"—were agreed to by 183 nations on the basis of "consensus."  [More]

The Dogs That Didn't Bark
The most important part of the Vienna Declaration is Part II, the statement of principles. And the key to grasping the grave problems of Part II is to notice, as Sherlock Holmes did, the dog that didn't bark—the affirmations that were not made.  [More]

The Indictment
Some examples will help establish this point. [More]

Boondoggles
The Vienna Declaration's action plan also in; eluded a couple of dubious proposals for expanding the U.N. human rights bureaucracy.  [More]