The Routledge Companion To Literature And Human Rights

Makau Mutua

Introduction

The last half of the twentieth century – after World War II – was undoubtedly the golden era of human rights. No less an authority than Louis Henkin, one of the key intellectual fathers of the modern human rights movement, dubbed the period the “Age of Rights.” He wrote that “[h]uman rights is the idea of our time, the only political moral idea that has received universal acceptance” (Henkin 1990: xvii). Philip Alston, a leading contemporary scholar of human rights, has argued that naming a claim a “human right elevates it above the rank and file of competing societal goals” and bestows upon it an “aura of timelessness, absoluteness and universal validity” (Alston 1988: 3). These are strong claims. One critique of them is that they are part of an echo chamber. They are grandiose statements made by insiders – those with an interest in depicting human rights as a zenith of human civilization. The assertions deserve further scrutiny.

What is not in doubt is the cascade of norms, processes, and institutions propagating human rights since WWII. These mushroomed everywhere at the universal, regional, and national levels – even in states where the genre of rights was not indigenous to the native tongue. Ideological battles about the universality of human rights – and their application and legitimacy in the Global South – were waged with vigor. Those battles have not completely abated. But what is true is that by the close of the twentieth century, human rights had conquered vast territories of the globe. The United Nations became the global champion of the human rights crusade around the world (Alston 1992). The work of the UN was buttressed by regional human rights systems in Africa, Europe, and the Americas. Within states, national constitutions increasingly took the normative content of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other key international human rights texts. Seen from this perspective, it is difficult to argue that the human rights idea was not phenomenally successful.

But it would be foolish to pretend without any qualification that the twentieth century was indeed the human rights epoch. Even as the seeds and sinews of human rights were planted worldwide, the last half of the century proved to be one of the brutal eras of our time. Genocides were committed in many countries, including Cambodia, Yugoslavia, Iraq, China, Rwanda, and Uganda (Totten and Parsons 2012). Unspeakable crimes were carried out in many other countries, including Argentina, Chile, and South Africa (Hayner 2010). As the century closed, the international community adopted the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, the first permanent tribunal designed to bring to account perpetrators of heinous crimes no matter their high stations in government and society (Schabas 2010). The ICC was the last great international initiative meant to contain impunity.

But by the end of the century, much of the enthusiasm that had characterized the surge of the human rights movement since the 1970s had cooled down. Human rights seemed to have failed to deliver a utopian world. In fact, the first decade and a half of the twenty-first century brought several dystopian catastrophes – the ugly American-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the descent into untold brutalities in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Sudan, and the slaughter of hundreds of thousands in Syria. While the language of human rights had become ubiquitous, its power to mobilize outrage and action seemed to fade. This is the question: is the lull in the seduction of the human rights corpus – and its movement – a temporary and fleeting phenomenon, or is the era of human rights truly over?

The deficits of human rights

Creeds and ideologies that overpromise – and inevitably underperform – are destined to suffer public fatigue. Human rights is one such ideology. I call human rights an ideology because it is a moral-legal-political and economic schema. It is moral because it propagates a set of beliefs that assume the innate nature of humans. Even if human rights are skeptical about the innate goodness of the human being, they assume that our worst proclivities will give way to our better angels if we live in a particular civilizational order. There has been a messianic germ in human rights. Its chief authors and proponents depict it in almost biblical, spiritual terms. Steiner and Alston, for example, have referred to the UDHR as the “parent document, the initial burst of idealism and enthusiasm, terser, more general and grander than the treaties, in some sense the constitution of the entire movement” (1996). Mary Ann Glendon went even further and argued that the UDHR “is already showing signs of having achieved the status of holy writ within the human rights movement” (1998). These views have been widely shared within the human rights movement, particularly in international nongovernmental organizations based in the West. Within these circles – and the foreign policy establishments of the West – the fundamental belief in human rights has been an article of faith.

Western human rights scholars and advocates – and their acolytes in the Global South – have been akin to a choir in church. Advocacy and defense of human rights are done with a religious zeal. The reason is that human rights have become the moral argument for the liberal project. It is an ideology that refines – and culminates in – political democracy, the rule of law, individual rights, constitutionalism, and free markets (Kennedy 2002). Franck argued forcefully that human rights are universal and require a western-style democratic government for their achievement (1992). These scholars have contended that going back to John Locke, the West was able to discover the genius for the good society by actualizing the liberal project. They have regarded many critiques of the human rights project as heresy. Even so, the human rights idea has failed to gain complete submission in cultures and traditions outside the West – especially in Asia, the Muslim world, and Africa. Thus the deficits in human rights – cultural, democratic, and ideological – point to either an incompleteness of the project or a crisis in the movement. It is these deficits that raise the question about the end of the human rights era.

Universality and hypocrisy

From its dawn, the human rights corpus has been dogged by the crisis of universality. The most damning charge against the UN-driven human rights texts has been its European, western parentage and normative basis (An-Na’im and Deng 1990). While progress has been made to address this deficit, many of the challenges it raises have not been successfully answered (Mutua 2001). The human rights movement largely remains a cultural possession of the West in spite of the adoption of its language as material for combatting political despotism by activists in the Global South. The failure of the human rights movement to effectively blunt the charge of normative, philosophical, and cultural exclusivity has contributed to its decline. Large swaths of the globe – China, India, the Middle East, and even Africa – still contest the universality of the human rights corpus. While most of these regions have accepted forms of free market economies – and varying degrees of political liberalization – they still have not fully embraced the culture of individual rights and the antidiscrimination and equal protection norms that lie at the heart of the human rights corpus.

The universality of human rights has also been undermined by the double standards – what critics see as hypocrisy – of the West. This is the case of preaching water, but drinking wine. The West has been accused of being guilty of the same abuses of human rights that it condemns other states for perpetuating. In particular, the West has been called to account for using human rights to advance its narrow foreign policy interests. In other cases, it has flouted human rights norms with impunity. During much of the Cold War, the West coddled right wing, fascist dictatorships across the globe even as it condemned the excesses of the Soviet bloc, China, and other Communist states. More recently, the US-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have exposed the duplicity of the West. It is now indisputable that George W. Bush, then US president, invaded Iraq on a nonexistent pretext of weapons of mass destruction (Bonn 2010). There is little doubt that in the ensuing carnage, the US committed war crimes during its Iraqi occupation (Ratner 2008). Similar war crimes have been committed in Afghanistan (Gall 2014). Lethal American drone strikes against terror suspects have often killed innocents and raised serious questions about their legality (Zenko 2013). Finally, the indefinite detention of al Qaeda suspects in Guantánamo – in what is effectively a legal “black hole” – seriously dents the claim that the United States is a rule of law state (Margulies 2007).

There have not been any serious attempts by western governments and intellectuals to seriously grapple with, and excavate, points of convergence between human rights and nonwestern traditions. The bridges that have been built to find a more universal human rights language have come primarily from advocates and intellectuals in the Global South. The African human rights system, which is anchored in the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights, expands the normative reach of the human rights corpus beyond its narrow Eurocentric roots (Mutua 1995). The African system has been credited with grounding and legitimizing the UN-driven universal human rights corpus in Africa (Okafor 2007). This has reduced the normative cultural human rights gap between Africa and the West. But it has been considerably more difficult in Asia and the Middle East to find more accommodation (Kausikan 1993; Panikar 1982). Similarly, the challenges to implanting a durable human rights culture in the Arab and Muslim Middle East and North Africa have been daunting (An-Na’im 2010). The so-called Arab Spring appeared to be a nod for a more liberal state driven by mainstream human rights norms, although the backlash and ensuing reversals speak of a more complex future (Lynch 2013).

The inability of the human rights corpus to secure complete dominance and the intellectual submission of traditions in the Global South is partially responsible for the eclipse of human rights. The cultural attacks on human rights – both well-meaning by those who believe in human dignity, but also by manipulative and hypocritical leaders in the Global South – have done much to slow the advance of human rights. The cultural terrain has been fiercely contested by protagonists on both sides. Religion has been used as a trump to chip away at the legitimacy of human rights. These factors, combined with what many in the Global South and even in the Global North see as the duplicity and hypocrisy of the West, have considerably undermined human rights. In some quarters, human rights came to be seen as a tool to justify a new imperialism by the West over darker peoples. It was reduced to a tool for the maintenance of an unjust global order, which is the exact opposite of its raison d’être. The catastrophic wars in Iraq and Afghanistan seem to have exhausted any benefit of the doubt that human rights was a pristine doctrine.

Fatigue and the persistence of privation

There is no doubt that the ideological surrender of Communism was the high-water mark of human rights. Intellectuals, states, and common citizens celebrated what they thought would be a new era characterized by the vocabulary of human rights. But other forms of geopolitics and moral equivalence soon took over. The War on Terror and security concerns quickly overtook human rights as a global language after the terrorist attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001 (Ignatieff 2002). The United States, in particular, seemed determined to go to any lengths to justify human rights violations in the name of fighting terror (Honigsberg 2009). Authoritarian dictatorships took American flouting of international law as carte blanche to commit the most heinous human rights atrocities. In Chechnya, Russia unleashed a savage war on the population in the name of fighting terror (Gilligan 2013). Israel, Sudan, Zimbabwe, and many others were now free to bring the hammer down harder on peoples under their control. By the end of the twentieth century, dictators across the globe had sprung back to action without the shame of being branded human rights violators.

Torture – a word that had been stigmatized by the globe – was now open to reinterpretation. Strangely, it was the actions of the US military and the Central Intelligence Agency that opened the door to a practice that had long been viewed as savage and unacceptable as state policy. The practice of waterboarding in which drowning was simulated, starving prisoners, renditions in which suspects were held in so-called black sites and tortured or handed over to torture-happy states became all too common (McCoy 2005; Goldsmith 2007). While the United States had always been the questionable moral voice of human rights, the War on Terror removed any such pretense. For the first time since the heyday of the human rights movement in the 1980s, the idiom of this powerful idea no longer had a state patron, a global moral champion. Deep disillusionment followed. Activists and true believers fell into deep despair. The language of human rights, which had always carried potency and purchase, was becoming a byword for futility in the face of atrocity. Concepts of donor and compassion fatigue entered the mainstream lexicon to signal unwillingness on the part of the West to care about victims of atrocities in far-away lands.

In the last several decades of the twentieth century until today, the pace of globalization has quickened at a rate never seen before. While hundreds of millions have been lifted from poverty, many more have been ravaged by free markets gone amok. This human privation – together with what appears to be intractable and savage conflicts in Syria and other conflict zones – has created a generalized atmosphere of helplessness and despair. What is more depressing is the lack of a language to mobilize global outrage or inspire action to arms. The balloon of human rights has certainly been popped, but there is no alternative and compelling idiom to fight injustice and mass catastrophes. The great powers are either ravenous – like Russia’s forcible annexation of Crimea – or seem paralyzed by inaction and confounded by complexity – like America’s dithering over the brutalities in Syria (Lexington 2013). The multipolar world with its many competing interests has pushed human rights down in the scale of important interests for global powers. It does not help that emerging global powers like China, India, and even Brazil do not consider international human rights a priority. Some of them, like China, are openly hostile to human rights. Human rights are still invoked by powerful states in the West, but it is increasingly more hortatory and obligatory than sincere.

Human rights: a post-mortem

There seems to be a large consensus that very few modern ideas have been as captivating – or enjoyed such universal success – as human rights. While the philosophical germ of human rights was not new, its emergence as a dominant global phenomenon after WWII was arguably without parallel. What John Locke articulated several centuries back as the basis for a state subject to the control of the citizenry was given universal purchase by human rights (1690). Human rights therefore give citizens and the international community the legal and moral fiat to put the state in a strait-jacket and demand accountability, transparency, and limits on its power. No other jurisprudence or legal-political-moral idea before then had so unequivocally tilted the balance of power towards the citizen and away from the state. The scheme of rights imposed on the state – and the powers granted to the international community to police compliance – were unprecedented. The idea of human rights spread like bushfire throughout the globe. Even dictators feigned respect for human rights. By the 1990s, human rights ideas had taken a foothold in civil society sectors in virtually every country. Human rights became the ubiquitous language of the last half of the twentieth century. The euphoria was palpable. Even so, the question remains about how deeply embedded human rights have been within the state and cultures around the world.

As the world looks back in the rear-view mirror of the human rights era, thinkers will have to acknowledge several salient facts. The first is that human rights inspired an era of secular religiosity. It is undeniable that human rights, a distinctly western construct, was a subtle continuum of the civilizing mission of the West against its former colonial possessions in the Global South. Its values and norms penetrated deeply beyond the Occident, and transformed many states and cultures. But what cannot be denied is that human rights were a western crusade of the white middle and upper classes in Europe and the United States (Mutua 1996). The core belief of these classes was no different from that of their colonizing forefathers of yesteryear – like the colonial mission, they thought that human rights would deliver primitive peoples into the Age of Europe. In the view of human rights missionaries, their ideology promised happiness and a glimpse of eternity (Alford 2000). This triumphalism has not completely ended. International nongovernmental organizations (INGOs) like the New York–based Human Rights Watch (HRW), one of the largest human rights groups in the world, still advocate a fervent view of the civilizing mission. Its angry holier-than-thou reports and work are driven by a moral certitude that depict it as a global moral policeman chastising states and cultures in the Global South for deviating from human rights norms. But there is mounting evidence that HRW is becoming more of an outlier as other western INGOs, like Amnesty International, become more circumspect and less imperial in their orientation. HRW may be a victim of its fossilized leadership, which has been frozen in place for more than two decades.

The second drawback of the human rights movement is that it overpromised, but underperformed, to stem human privation and suffering. While there is little doubt that the human rights movement has been a great success, it would be futile to deny that its large claims and promises – as being the antidote to human catastrophes – have not been borne out (Hopgood 2013). The more recent catastrophes in Syria, North Korea, Central African Republic, and Sudan, to mention only a few of the many desperate cases, point to the inability of the human rights movement to usher in an era of human civility and prosperity. To many in conflict-prone states, the future has never looked bleaker. The bad news is that the world, including the West and the UN, are paralyzed and unable to do anything to change the horrific facts on the ground. It is this inertia and powerlessness to do anything about mass killings and devastating wars and conflicts that have taken the luster out of human rights.

Conclusion

I have argued here that the human rights era has ended. But the end of its era does not necessarily signify the impotence of human rights norms and values. The internationalization – universalization – of human rights principles and tenets is so deeply embedded in the psyches of states and cultures around the world that it is irreversible. The triumph of the liberal constitution – the one indisputable evidence of the ubiquity of human rights – cannot be gainsaid. Concepts of constitutionalism and individual rights, which underpin the modern state, are not going away. These civilizational shifts – including in the Global South – are here to stay. This new compact between the state and the citizen was driven by the human rights movement. The human conscience is today revolted by the most heinous crimes – genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, rape, various forms of discrimination, and violations of speech and other rights. These are the successes of the human rights idea. But it is the deficits – the failure of the human rights movement to change the abusive proclivities of humans and states – that have dimmed the human rights era. But nothing has replaced human rights as the universal inspirational ideology or philosophy. The end of the human rights era has left the world with a moral vacuum.