Abstract
Drawing on an emerging iconoclastic human rights historiography, pioneered by the historian Samuel Moyn, López traces the origins of human rights not to a mythical postwar consensus at the UN, but to a concatenation of social and political dynamics in the 1970s. This historical vantage point opens up avenues for developing thicker conceptions of human rights by drawing attention to the concrete historical and social relational contexts in which human rights emerged, and which subsequently enabled them to be disseminated. Drawing on the work of Jeffrey Alexander, Bob Jessop, and Margaret Somers, the notion of political imaginary is developed, and defined as assemblages of social representations, social technologies, modes of agency and subjectivity, and particular organizational forms.
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Notes
- 1.
On the notion of legal and rights consciousness, see Scheingold (2004, xvii–xvlii). For an overview of the emergence and subsequent development of legal consciousness in sociolegal studies, see Silbey (2005). For examples of substantive empirical explorations of legal consciousness, see Ewick and Silbey (1998), Engel and Munger (2003), and Sarat and Kearns (2009). For a critique of the legal consciousness research programme, see Valverde (2003a, b).
- 2.
One of the iconic drafters of the UDHR , René Cassin , noted, in its effort to achieve consensus, the committee tasked with drafting the document sidestepped “metaphysical controversies […] on the origins of human rights” (cited in Slaughter 2009, 47).
- 3.
Amongst the critics of human rights’ thinness, some argue, as I will show in the next chapter, for the need to develop a more combative conception, as Blau and Moncada do when they insist on the need to go beyond “the liberal vision” (2005). Others claim that the apparent austerity of human rights as a moral language is belied by an unspoken political project (liberalism) whose hegemony allows it to remain unmarked qua political project (Brown 2004).
- 4.
Charles Beitz (2011), a political philosopher, whose work I discuss in more detail in Chap. 4, develops a thoughtful critique of contemporary attempts to ground human right’s normativity. He opts instead for grasping the normative valence of human rights by framing them as the product of an emergent practice that provides agents with reasons for action, specifically with the goal of protecting “important individual interests against predictable threats and to deter societies from developing certain features that might cause their government to pursue policies that threaten international order” (2011, 131).
- 5.
This of course does not entail denying the social and causal efficacy or the “epistemological privilege” of particular “ideational regimes” (Somers and Block 2005). Rather it draws attention to fact that even though a moral order might originate “in an explicit doctrine or theory […] the process through which it penetrates and takes hold of a social imaginary is slow and complex” (Gaonkar 2002, 11).
- 6.
For a fascinating attempt to show the possibility of universalizing local human rights cultures, see Gregg (2011). Interesting as this account is, it is a prospective one that does not explain the contemporary global currency of human rights, but posits how such a vision might plausibly be extended.
- 7.
This of course is also a dilemma faced by political anthropologists, “So we are left with either a philosophically rich but phenomenologically thin set of explanations for social life on the one hand, or on the other, a set of general ideas of real importance that are nevertheless kept frustratingly incipient – social theory that dare not speak its name” (Goodale 2009, 7).
- 8.
- 9.
For Habermas , “the legitimacy of the rule of law depends, rather, on the institutionalization of those procedural norms, through which the private individual is recognized, not just as a bearer of fundamental rights but also as a potential contributor to those discursive processes through which the idea of the common good gains legal sanction” (Johnson 2001, 45). Concretely, the procedural norms that Habermas has in mind are those that “guarantee the discursive mode by means of which generation and application of legislative programs are to proceed within the parameters of rational debate. This implies the institutionalization of legal procedures that guarantee an approximate fulfillment of the demanding preconditions of communication required for fair negotiations and free debates. These idealizing preconditions demand the complete inclusion of all parties that might be affected, their equality, free and easy interaction, no restrictions of topic and topical contributions, the possibility of revising the outcomes, etc. In this context the legal procedures serve to uphold within an empirically existing community of communication the spatial, temporal, and substantive constraints on choices that are operative within a presumed ideal one” (Habermas 1992, 449). For a range of responses to Habermas’ critical theory , see Meehan (2013).
- 10.
Alexander ’s is not a jejune vision of civil society. From the start he concedes that justice is a possibility that is “devilishly difficult to obtain” because of the contradictions of institutionalization but most fundamentally “because meaning is relational and relative” and “the civility of the self always articulates itself in language about the incivility of the other” (2006, 50).
- 11.
For the purposes of theoretically locating the strong programme, Alexander and his collaborators divide sociological analyses of culture into two camps: the sociology of culture and cultural sociology. The latter is reserved for the strong programme, while the former is used to refer to all those approaches, the majority in sociology according to Alexander and Smith , that understand culture as an effect of social structure, thus depriving culture of any real autonomy. Social structure refers to the social processes whereby individuals are differentially distributed in social space leading to identity, interest and group formation, in different spheres and at different scales (e.g., gender, class, nation). Social structure is also conjoined with material factors (Alexander and Smith 2003, 11). A cultural sociology , in contrast to a sociology of culture, should be able to identify cultural determinants that function as an “independent variable” identifying “inputs every bit as vital as more material or instrumental forces” (Alexander and Smith 2003, 12). Although this first step is heuristically very useful in opening up a conceptual space for the autonomy of culture, collapsing the totality of the sociology of culture, cultural studies, and Foucauldian analyses under the rubric the sociology of culture cuts the strong programme off from many explanatory elements and mechanisms that could potentially enrich its analysis.
- 12.
I am not discounting the important explanatory power of these elements; I believe they alone do not suffice.
- 13.
In practical conceptual terms, this is accomplished by opposing affect and meaning, which Alexander and Smith see as being generated by the deep structures of culture, with purely instrumental, coerced, or reflexive action. Moreover since culture is transversal to social phenomena, even the most interest-laden action or the most technocratic and rational of bureaucracies are not devoid of the horizon of meaning and affect that culture enables (Alexander and Smith 2003, 12). Thus it is possible to distil the cultural structure that provides any social phenomenon with meaning by “bracketing-out” social relations that are non-symbolic (Alexander and Smith 2003, 14).
- 14.
Somers is referring to the structural or normative autonomy of social institutions. Mention of the relational materialism of science studies is particularly apropos because as Alexander and Smith note, the designation of “strong” is taken from the strong programme in science and technology studies, which they understand to mean the “radical uncoupling of cognitive content from natural determination”. Translated into the cultural sphere this requires, they contend, an uncoupling of social structure and cultural structure (2003, 13). I am not convinced that this is a felicitous translation. A more pertinent uncoupling of meaning and its indetermination by the intransitive domain of reality is to be found in the work of Roy Bhaskar (Bhaskar 1978; see López and Potter 2001).
- 15.
In this respect, Alexander is critical of Gramsci’s conception of hegemony, Althusser ’s notion of interpellation, and Foucault ’s conflation of power and knowledge. He argues that these authors assume an automaticity that obscures the contingency of performance, going as far as claiming that they “assume powerful scripts, great actors, compliant audiences, corrupted or brainwashed journalists, and bought-off critics. With a wave of the hand, texts become automatically transformed into successful action. Whether it is law, school books, movies, political campaigns or wars, background representations are assumed to speak, and to speak persuasively” (Alexander 2011, 88). This is, to my mind, an overstatement. After all, Gramsci’s theory of hegemony represents an attempt not only to explain the failure of the performance of a socialist script but also to theorize the conditions under which the performance of hegemonic worldviews might equally backfire (Gramsci 1971). Similarly, Foucault ’s conceptualization of knowledge in the context of fields of dispersion (1972), or in terms of micro-politics (1995), frames social performances as contingent and subject to failure. Finally, with respect to Althusser, the problem is perhaps not due to his conception of interpellation, but to his functionalist understanding of the role of ideology in social reproduction (Hirst 1976). All the same, it is worth remembering that Althusser was keen to displace accounts of the social in terms of expressive totalities, and his theoretical work was oriented towards tooling thought to grasp the complexity of the social (López 2003, 115–37). What is more, Judith Butler, an author whose conception of performativity Alexander cites favourably (2011, 217–18), persuasively claims that Althusser ’s conception of interpellation remains central for contemporary theories of subject formation and “continues to survive its critique” (Butler 1995, 6).
- 16.
The classic source of performance theory outside of dramaturgical studies is of course cultural anthropology, namely, the work of Victor Turner (1985, 1986; see Gonquergood 1989) and James Clifford (1988), the linguistic theory of John Austin (1962; see Hall 1999), and the work of the philosopher Judith Butler (1988), all of which are acknowledged by Alexander (2011). For overviews of performance theory across the humanities and the social sciences, see Bauman and Briggs (1990), Carlson (2013), and Schechner (2004).
- 17.
Of course the notion of a “successful performance” is difficult to disentangle in the context of human rights. While a human rights performance might resonate as morally meaningful to an audience, this in itself does not guarantee that the resources and capacity will be available to remediate the situation. Indeed as Moyn argues, if worldly success were required to maintain the vitality of human rights, then “their worth will ultimately be open to doubt, sooner or later” (2015, 180). That this has yet to be the case indicates that performance in this second and fuller sense, namely, as change inducing, has not been heretofore necessary for the “successful” performance of human rights. Said differently, “Why does all the energy and effort going into human rights activism produce such decidedly meager results? How could the rhetoric of human rights be so globally pervasive while the politics of human rights is so utterly weak” (Cmiel 2004, 118)?
- 18.
- 19.
- 20.
For accounts that stress the long roots of human rights, see Lauren (1998) and Ishay (2004) and Cmiel (2004) for a critical overview. The impact of the eighteenth-century revolutions is dealt with by Hunt (2007), while Glendon (2002) is an excellent exemplar of the visionary genre, and Borgwardt (2007) explores the intersection of human rights and American internationalism. The roots of human rights in the abolitionist movement are detailed in Blackburn (2013), while anti-colonialism is dealt with by Burke (2011). Anderson (2003) addresses the criss-crossing of anti-racism and human rights.
- 21.
As Mark Mazower notes, “soon the protagonists of these accounts turn into visionaries and heroes – inspiration for our drabber and less strenuous times: Eleanor Roosevelt , Raphael Lemkin, René Cassin , and other leading figures in the emergence of the UN and especially of its human rights regime are now routinely invoked as reminders of what individual commitment and activism can accomplish” (2009, 6; cf. Bradley 2012, 330). See, especially, Glendon (2002) and Lauren (1998).
- 22.
Lauren , for instance, cites Eleanor Roosevelt , the chair of the Human Rights Committee that drafted the UDHR, who claimed, “At a time when there are so many issues on which we find it difficult to reach a common basis of agreement, it is a significant fact that …[so many] states have found such large measure of agreement in the complex field of human rights” (cited in Lauren 1998, 280).
- 23.
In horticulture a variety typically occurs in nature and is true to type. A cultivar is a “cultivated variety”, the product of human selection and cultivation; it is not necessarily true to type, that is, offspring can differ from parents.
- 24.
I develop this point more fully in my analysis of the development of human rights in Europe in Chap. 6.
- 25.
Probst does not argue that the Holocaust was never mentioned or that it played no role at all, but that it was far from central. This was to change in the 1990s after the fall of the Berlin Wall (2003, 55). Consequently the Holocaust as a founding act of the EU is “only plausible from an ex-post perspective” (Probst 2003, 54).
- 26.
Marco Duranti draws attention to “French right-wing intellectuals such as Alexandre Marc , who had called on Hitler to lead the youth of Europe towards the construction of ‘new order’ in 1933, and Louis Salleron , who had been instrumental in formulating Vichy corporatist policies […] In the Congress’ political committee, Hélène de Suzannet , one of the most outspoken advocates of amnesty for imprisoned collaborators in France tabled a motion in favour of the right of individuals to petition such a court [a European human rights court], and Reginald Thomas Paget , one of the foremost champions of the rights of accused German war criminals and a seminal figure in the ‘Holocaust denial’” (Duranti 2012, 161). Duranti argues that “the heretofore overlooked involvement of such figures in the ‘human rights revolution’ suggests that the birth of international human rights law cannot be read so directly out of the Jewish genocide and the [French] republican tradition as commonly supposed” (2012, 161).
- 27.
Christian democracy ’s extraordinary success in shepherding postwar Europe away from authoritarian nationalism and positioning itself as a bulwark against the communist threat through its commitment to market liberalism and parliamentary democracy in part explains its surprising postwar hegemony (Kaiser 2007). However, it is worth remembering that even as recently as the interwar period, Catholics and Christian Democrats were deeply suspicious of parliamentary government, mass democracy, and the market economy (Kaiser 2007, 35), hence their support for more conservative, at times authoritarian, social, and political arrangements. Moyn locates the origin of a personalist-inspired Christian human rights in 1937 and argues that the conception of human dignity and rights underwriting Christian human rights was characterized by its rejection of authoritarianism. However, this disavowal of illiberalism was not only compatible with the conservative moral governance that would flourish in the postwar, such governance was in fact the telos of Christian Human Rights (Moyn 2015, 15; see Duranti 2016).
- 28.
Another notable post-colonial elite committed to Christian human rights is Mark Romulo , the Philippines delegate to the United Nations, who made important contributions to the General Assembly debate on the UDHR (Moyn 2015, 92). Moyn also draws attention to the work of Jacques Maritain , the French Catholic philosopher, whose trajectory towards human rights through personalism is a complex one, as it was for the Catholic Church (2015, 73–89). It required breaking with antecedent authoritarian positions and renouncing critical dismissals of formal rights that had echoed those made by Mounier (2015, 86). Following this, he was to become the “main publicist of Christian personalism” in the UN and beyond, giving it a broader resonance (Moyn 2010, 64).
- 29.
Borgwardt (2007) argues that this being so, the rhetorical shift introduced by the incorporation of the term human rights proved nonetheless to be consequential.
- 30.
Borgwardt notes that when Norman Rockwell , the American illustrator, set out to represent the Four Freedoms that subsequently reappeared in the Atlantic Charter, which “went on to become some of the most enduring icons of the war years form many Americans on the home front”, the internationalist hue of the freedoms was replaced with an exclusively domestic home front palate (2007, 47).
- 31.
Moyn draws attention to the novelty of the right to change religions in Article 18 of the UDHR . This was motivated by the perception that missionary activities might be under threat and pushed several Muslim states to abstain in the General Assembly (Moyn 2015, 152).
- 32.
Origin may not be destiny, but origin can in some case produce structural selectivity. In this context, it is worth mentioning Moyn ’s discussion of recent headscarf jurisprudence in the EU. Whereas many commentators critical of the jurisprudence suggest that decisions supporting headscarf bans arise from excessive secularism and Islamophobia, Moyn reflecting on religious freedom’s original anti-communist rationale draws different conclusions. He writes, the “doctrinal basis on which the cases ultimately rest had nothing originally to do with religion in general or Islam in particular. Instead its source lies in Cold War anxiety that secularist communism would topple Christian democracy . If so, the secularism of the European Court’s headscarf jurisprudence is a recent artifact, primarily following from the collapse of European Christianity in recent memory. Even more ironically […] the European Court headscarf cases actually owe part of their doctrinal rationale and perhaps their exclusionary associations not to the secularist associations of religious freedom but to the legacy of religious struggles against communism once feared as secularism incarnate. The Muslim has taken the place of the communist in European imagination – and above all in the history of the religious liberty norm” (2015, 145).
- 33.
- 34.
As historian, political, and legal scholar Mary L. Dudziak shows in her finely researched monograph Cold War Civil Rights, leveraging a critique of American racism via the UDHR was blocked to African Americans. This is because “to criticize the nation before an international audience and to air the nation’s dirty laundry overseas was to reinforce the negative impact of American racism on the nation’s standing as a world leader. It was seen, therefore, as a great breach of loyalty. As a result, just as the House Committee on Un-American Activities and the government’s loyalty security programme silenced progressive voices within the United States, through passport restrictions and international negotiations the long arm of US government red-baiting silenced critics of US racism overseas” (2011, 12). Dudziak ’s work compelling shows how an understanding of the national civil rights reforms necessitates putting them in an international context. Insofar, as the US sought to position itself as a world leader in the Cold War, accusations of racism and racial violence tarnished its image, affecting its foreign relations strategies. One could think here about the US state’s concerns to prevent newly independent countries in the global south from falling into the Soviet sphere of influence. Consequently, argues Dudziak , “[t]he Cold War created a constraining environment for domestic politics. It also gave rise to new opportunities for those who could exploit Cold War anxieties, while yet remaining within the bounds of acceptable ‘Americanism’” (2011, 15). Ironically, the attempt to introduce a human rights logic to the civil rights struggles, under the banner of anti-imperialism and colonialism, undertaken by more radical figures such as Malcolm X in the late 1960s (Dudziak 2011, 224–25), occurred at a conjuncture when the Vietnam War would replace civil rights as the issue defining US prestige abroad, after which civil rights would become peripheral to US foreign affairs (Dudziak 2011, 248). Moreover, as explored in Chap. 6, it was precisely the link between human rights and anti-colonialism that made lawyers allergic to human rights.
- 35.
Parenthetically, Keys notes Amnesty International in the US “was saddled, too, with a name that for most Americans immediately conjured up the deeply polarizing issue of amnesty for Vietnam War draft resisters. In the early 1970s AI USA staff feared its mail was being sabotaged by postal workers who misconstrued the amnesty in its title” (2014, 89).
- 36.
The following paragraphs draw extensively from Keys’ analysis (2014, 103–213).
- 37.
- 38.
Term used to describe Soviet Jews who were “refused” permission to emigrate to Israel; see Peretz (2017).
- 39.
This, of course, chimed with the retreat from grand utopian projects of social transformation and the minimalist and moralized politics that had provided fertile ground for the emergence of contemporary human rights, as discussed above.
- 40.
A strategic site of intervention, as Keys documents, was the foreign aid authorization bill. While liberals denounced foreign aid for supporting oppressive regimes, conservatives lambasted its ballooning cost and status as overly generous hand-out. This meant that bipartisan support could be secured for efforts to reduce aid to undemocratic regimes. In addition, because this was a bill that came around every year, the bill became a magnet for all manner of amendments (Keys 2014, 139).
- 41.
As Keys (2014, 264–66) and others have argued, most notably Snyder (2011), more consequential for transnational human rights organizing would be the impact of the Helsinki Final Act , signed during the presidency of Gerald Ford . Sarah B. Snyder argues that “the Helsinki process was one factor that shaped Gorbachev’s thinking about human rights, self-determination and nonviolence, all of which contributed to the demise of communism in Eastern Europe and the collapse of the Soviet Union” (2011, 217).
- 42.
It is interesting to note that “Ronald Reagan, William Haig and William Casey, and other high officials read and praised Claire Sterling ’s book The Terror Network , only to later discover to their embarrassment that it was based essentially on CIA disinformation ‘blown back’” (Zulaika and Douglass 1996, 14). Nonetheless, “[i]n general, during the 1980s, counterterrorism became a surrogate for earlier efforts to fight Communist subversion abroad, whereas at home it became ‘the talisman’ the FBI needed to conduct investigations of those in opposition to the Reagan administration’s policies in Central America’” (Zulaika and Douglass 1996, 15).
- 43.
Robert L. Bernstein created Helsinki Watch in 1978, with Orville Schell Jr., an elite New York lawyer, and Aryeh Neier who was finishing his tenure as the director of the American Civil Liberties Union. Bernstein , chairman and CEO of Random House, had become concerned with the situation of dissident writers during a visit to the Soviet Union (Neier 2012, 205). Funded first by the Ford and subsequently by the MacArthur Foundations, Helsinki Watch focused its attention on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. The election of Ronald Reagan , who first attempted to dismiss human rights and then co-opt them for anti-communism, forced the organization to widen its mandate: “The Leaders of Helsinki Watch were concerned that in such circumstances, an American organization that denounced abuses of human rights by the Soviet Unions and the states it controlled, but did not also deal with abuses of human rights regimes aligned with Washington would lose credibility. It would be seen simply as a mouthpiece for an administration that had made clear its intention to use accounts of human rights abuse as a stick to belabor its enemies while serving as an apologist for severe abuses by its friends” (Neier 2012, 206–7). This eventuated in the America’s Watch Committee (Neier 2012, 207).
Neier argues that the competitive advantage that Helsinki Watch , and then Human Rights Watch , had over Amnesty International in the 1980s in the US was due to the latter’s initial narrow focus on prisoners of conscience (Neier 2012, 204). Freedom Watch , which would also become a key player in the field of human rights, “emphasized to its donors that it had no ties to Amnesty and privately criticized its rival for focusing on the effects rather than the causes of repression and for ‘emphasiz[ing] the most aberrational acts of violence by the government’” (Keys 2014, 213). Helsinki Watch , on the other hand, expanded its mandates to new areas such as the violations of the laws of war, was more streamlined and could react more quickly to changing conditions as a result of its non-reliance on membership funding, and was openly engaged in the practice of trying to steer US foreign policy in the direction of human rights promotion (Neier 2012, 202–5). This said, as Keys careful analysis shows, Amnesty International had more of an impact on US foreign policy than it first appears (2014, 206–12).
- 44.
Overall the authors conclude, “we find that human rights do play a role in the decision of who receives US bilateral foreign assistance, and how much aid they are allotted. But other national security interests play a more prominent role. Countries perceived to be of vital importance to US national security, as measured by the presence of military personnel, along with Latin America, receive aid regardless of their human rights records” (Apodaca and Stohl 1999, 196). This is telling, as Latin America was a key focus of human rights activism during the Carter and Reagan administrations.
- 45.
This self-evidence as I will show in the next chapter is the product of the human rights political imaginary. Consequently its conditions of possibility need to be investigated rather than taken at face value.
- 46.
Consequently, although to my mind, Borgwardt may not show how human rights were internationalized, she nonetheless convincingly shows how the values of the New Deal were. She accomplishes this by outlining the semiotic, political, cultural, and economic relational matrix that overdetermined their internationalization. Consequently her historical account by no means constitutes a thin account.
- 47.
My approach to sociological explanation does not prioritize theory over empirical work. In fact, as noted in the book’s introduction, the political imaginary framework was developed in the context of my empirical historical research on the emergence of the human right to food (López 2015), from which the discussion that follows draws.
- 48.
Of course, this corresponds to Althusser ’s definition of ideology. Admittedly it has shortfalls as a theory of ideology; nonetheless it has been very productive as a theory of subjectivation (Butler 1995; López 2003, 133–37). What is more, Althusser ’s inability to develop a tenable distinction between ideology and science does not mean that the concept of ideology should be abolished; for a powerful defence of the pertinence of ideology as an analytical category in the context of the cultural turn, see Purvis and Hunt (1993).
- 49.
The field of dispersion is of course of Foucauldian provenance, from his work on the archaeology of knowledge (1972).
- 50.
I address my own standpoint on objectivity in sociological practice in the next chapter.
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Julián López, J. (2018). Human Rights as Political Imaginary. In: Human Rights as Political Imaginary. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74274-8_2
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