Human Rights in Pinochet’s Chile: The Dethronement of Politics 8 страница
The final text of Article 18, which Malik promoted, reads as follows: ‘Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.’ While freedom of conscience had a long history, there was no consensus that it required a right to change religion. Kathryn Sikkink argues that Malik based his support for such a right ‘not on a Western precedent, but on his country’s experience accepting religious refugees, some of whom fled persecution resulting from religious conversions’.155 But the very idea of Lebanon as a ‘Christian refuge’, as Lebanese historian Fayyaz Traboulsi notes, was bound to an idea of its distinctiveness with respect to Arab identity and Islam, both part of “barbaric Asia”’.156
The strongest opposition to the right to change one’s religion came from Baroody, the delegate from Saudi Arabia. Baroody was representing a repressive, theocratic state, and scholars have been quick to identify his challenge to this right, and Saudi Arabia’s abstention from the final UDHR, as a product of the prohibition on apostasy in conservative Wahhabi interpretations of Islam.157 But the picture is more complicated than that. Baroody, like Malik, was a Lebanese Christian. In opposing the right to change one’s religion, he never referred to Islamic law, but instead framed this new right as a right for missionaries. Proselytising Christians had historically become the vanguards of political interventions, he argued, and ‘peoples had been drawn into murderous conflict by the missionaries’ efforts to convert them’.158 Baroody depicted Article 18 as a right to open up non-Western societies for trade and exploitation. Such concerns resonated with Chang, who responded: ‘For the countries of the Far East, the nineteenth century, with its expansion of Western industrialism, had not always been very kind’, and missionaries had not always limited themselves to their religious missions.159
Chang would have known well that, when the First Opium War ended in 1842 with the Treaty of Nanking, which forced China to open to Western commerce, this led to great evangelical and commercial excitement back in Britain. Trade, even when forced upon a country by gunboats, was a vehicle for spreading the word of the gospels and promoting universal brotherhood. ‘Those who denied their people access to truth, and to the manufactures of the West’, in contrast, ‘were infringing on an inherent human right’.160 When the Second Opium War ended with the 1858 Treaties of Tianjin, traders were granted almost unlimited access to China’s territory, and missionaries were guaranteed the freedom to evangelise their faith.161 The status of missionaries had long played an important role in European attempts to determine which states were sufficiently ‘civilised’ to enter the family of nations, and the forcible imposition of unequal treaties was a consequence of falling short of this standard in European eyes. The imposition of this standard meant the coercive transformation of China’s legal, political and economic systems to make its territory safe for commerce, conversion and capital accumulation. Despite this history of proselytising as precursor to commercial and military interventions, Chang spoke in favour of the right to change one’s religion, leaving Baroody to declare him ‘over-optimistic’ in allowing missionaries to repeat their past mistakes.162
|
|
|
Both Baroody and Malik had significant personal experience with missionaries. Both men were graduates of the American University of Beirut (AUB), established by Protestant missionaries (originally as the Syrian Protestant College) in 1866. That formative experience shaped Malik’s emphasis on freedom of conscience; in 1923, when he arrived at the AUB, its new president, Baynard Dodge, used his inaugural address to assure his students that the university did not intend to proselytise: ‘To us, Protestantism means religious freedom.’163 Yet the AUB was not just an island of religious tolerance; it was also evidence of the tight bond between commerce and Christianity. The university was established using the fortunes of the Dodge family, whose mining interests in the United States had given them a particular interest in the ‘civilising’ of indigenous peoples, upon whose un-ceded land they built mines. Those who built the Dodge fortune also committed themselves to the ‘assimilation and uplift’ of African-Americans in the South during Reconstruction – but only after the failure of their preferred option of resettlement in Liberia.164 Both Baroody and Malik were products of the Dodges’ civilising mission in the Middle East – but with very different outcomes.
|
|
|
Baroody’s interpretation of the UDHR’s right to change religion as a right for missionaries was largely accurate. The freedom of missionary activities was a key concern of those Protestant and Catholic nongovernmental organisations Malik credited for their important role in the formulation of the draft article on religious freedom.165 The codification of the right to change one’s religion had been a particular concern for the Commission of the Churches on International Affairs, and was grounded in concerns about barriers to missionary work, particularly in the Middle East. For the churches, the right to religious freedom necessarily included the right to hear the gospel, and thus required freedom of proselytism, especially in the face of the strictures of Islamic law.166
It would nonetheless be mistaken to portray the debates over this right as a ‘clash of civilisations’ between Christianity and Islam. Such a position not only ignores a history of mutual borrowing and interactions among Christians, Jews and Muslims, but, as Asad writes, it attributes to a people an identity (European, Islamic) that ‘depends on the definition of a selective civilizational heritage of which most of the people to whom it is attributed are in fact almost completely ignorant’.167 Moreover, delegates from countries with Muslim majorities were split on the right to change religion. Pakistan’s representative and foreign minister, Sir Mohammed Zafrullah Khan, actively embraced the missionary implications Baroody saw in Article 18, arguing that, as Islam was also a proselytising religion, Muslims must insist that conscience is free and able to change its judgment. In support of this position, he cited the Koran: ‘Let he who chooses to believe, believe, and he who chooses to disbelieve, disbelieve.’168
|
|
|
While Baroody framed his opposition to Article 18 as a rejection of what Makau Mutua calls ‘proselytism, coupled with force and power’, there was nonetheless an irony to his advocacy of non-intervention.169 Whatever his own personal commitments, which were largely Arabist in tenor, Baroody represented a kingdom whose participation in the inaugural UN conference was funded by the US Oil Company Aramco, and which owed its existence as an independent state largely to these same US oil interests. ‘The transformation of the landscape that became Saudi Arabia’, as the political scientist Robert Vitalis writes, ‘was wrought in great part by foreigners, arriving in increasing numbers in the 1940s and 1950s, financed by foreign investment, foreign private and public aid, and large loans secured by future oil royalties.’170 By the time Baroody was representing Saudi Arabia, David Dodge, the son of his old AUB president, was himself working for Aramco as a senior figure in its government relations department – a position in which he would have exerted significant influence over the Saudi state.
Baroody may have represented a US client state, but the arguments he made during the drafting of the UDHR would become increasingly worrying for the neoliberals. In rejecting the missionary implications of the new human rights discourse, he challenged the legitimacy of the attempt to establish global standards to secure the integration of the world market. As the UDHR was being drafted, Baroody gave a paper in New York, where he warned that, in the event of another global conflict, the ‘Arab East … may become one of the major battlegrounds and graveyards of the clashing modern civilizations’.171 It was essential, he warned perceptively, that this region’s resources, especially its oil, not become ‘war fuel’. The biggest danger, he argued, was that ‘the old blind belligerent forces may plunge the world into a ghastly global conflict’.172 By drawing attention to the violence of previous attempts at conversion, Baroody worked to challenge the legitimacy of European civilizing missions. In this sense, it is accurate to depict his argument as a ‘relatively mild’ foretaste of the anti-imperialism that later became prominent in UN forums.173 In response, the neoliberals would draw the missionary and interventionist implications of the new human rights language, which framed human rights as a means to enforce global standards to support the old rights of private capital.
|
|
|
For the neoliberals, the Christian emphasis on freedom of conscience provided a foundation for the freedom of individual choice that a market order required. They nonetheless gave their own twist to this freedom. In 1945, Hayek wrote:
To the accepted Christian tradition that man must be free to follow his conscience in moral matters if his actions are to be of any merit, the economists added the further argument that he should be free to make full use of his knowledge and skill, that he must be allowed to be guided by his concern for the particular things of which he knows and for which he cares, if he is to make as great a contribution to the common purposes of society as he is capable of making.174
In post-war Europe and the United States, the neoliberals watched with horror as faith in the market was increasingly displaced by concerns with the welfare and economic security of the working classes. Malik likewise criticised the West for its wrong turn, and demanded its repentance for having offered the East only the ‘false Gods of modern Western civilization: nationalism, materialism, Communism’.175 To Malik’s despair, these ‘false Gods’ were embraced by many of his fellow diplomats during the drafting of the Declaration.
In the wake of the war, ‘civilisation’ was retooled in a social-democratic direction, and even liberals increasingly recognised that competing with the temptations on the left and the right required them to recognise the social and economic needs of the working classes. ‘To be civilized, in the old liberal sense’, the historian Mark Mazower notes, ‘was not necessarily to be modern’.176 On the contrary, it was to prioritise a set of civil liberties and property rights that increasingly appeared antiquated.177 The promise of social welfare gave a new impetus to the language of civilisation by associating it with rising living standards and material welfare. Within less than three years of the adoption of the UDHR, Malik warned that human rights were under threat from the ultimate danger of materialism, which he argued inverted the hierarchy that should place civil and political rights above social and economic ones. ‘Certain rights’, he complained, ‘are assuming exaggerated importance; it is hard to keep them in their place. Who is not clamouring today for his economic rights, for what is called a decent standard of living?’178 For the neoliberals, too, these developments threatened to subject the whole world to totalitarianism. The threat to the central values of civilisation, identified in the MPS statement of aims, was, first of all, a threat to market competition in the face of the ‘revolt of the masses’.
There Is No Such Thing as ‘the Economy’: On Social and Economic Rights
The masses demand, unabated, a minimum of vital security.
Louis Rougier
In a searing 1966 critique, Friedrich Hayek described the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as an incoherent attempt ‘to fuse the rights of the Western liberal tradition with an altogether different conception derived from the Marxist Russian Revolution’.1 Hayek praised the document’s first twenty-one articles for following the eighteenth century precedent and enshrining the ‘classical civil rights’.2 But he heavily criticised the remaining articles, which laid out a long list of social and economic rights, including rights to social security, work, rest and leisure, food, clothing, housing, medical care, social security and education, and to form and join trade unions.3 Hayek believed such guarantees fundamentally misunderstood the nature of rights. Not only were they too vague for a court to enforce, he argued; they were ultimately meaningless, as no declaration of rights could actually guarantee anyone a certain standard of material welfare. In scathing terms, he wrote that the ‘conception of a “universal right” which assures to the peasant, to the Eskimo, and presumably to the Abominable Snowman, “periodic holidays with pay” shows the absurdity of the whole thing’.4
Addressing young people born into welfare states, Hayek challenged the social philosophy underpinning social and economic rights. There is no such thing as a ‘society’ with a duty to care for its members, he argued, anticipating Margaret Thatcher. Hayek contended that ‘society’ is simply a ‘spontaneous order’ that emerges as individuals and families pursue their welfare on the market. In social and economic rights, he saw the influence of a conflicting social philosophy, which viewed ‘society’ as a ‘deliberately made organization’. Hayek gave law and rights a central role in his own account of a free society predicated on the division of labour. Far from dismissing human rights, he criticised the drafters for weakening the concept of ‘right’ and destroying all respect for it. A declaration of rights should do no more than the ‘time-honoured political and civil rights’ have always done, he argued: ‘delimit individual domains’ in which private initiative, entrepreneurialism, and personal responsibility can flourish.5
By the time Hayek made these remarks, such views were gaining ground. That year, two legally binding human rights covenants were adopted by the United Nations. Unable to replicate the compromises that had led to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) in a document destined to become binding international law, the drafters produced both an International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and an International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. Among those that refused to sign on to the latter was the United States, where it was often viewed with suspicion as a ‘Covenant on Uneconomic, Socialist and Collective Rights’.6 Nor did its social and economic rights attract any significant domestic support in the United States, ‘even from within the human rights community, which has … always been assumed to be its natural constituency’.7
When a new generation of international human rights NGOs came to prominence in the late 1970s, they largely pursued a narrow agenda of protecting what Hayek termed ‘classical civil rights’, rather than promoting social and economic rights. Aryeh Neier, the former head of the US-based Human Rights Watch (HRW), noted with displeasure that, in enshrining a list of social and economic rights, the UDHR marked a ‘radical break with its predecessors’.8 ‘Not everybody can have everything’, Neier contended in 2006, and the role of human rights should be to specify those few things to which everyone is entitled.9 Even as major human rights NGOs, including HRW, have gradually shifted their attention to social and economic rights, they have largely restricted their focus to discrimination in the provision of welfare, where it is possible, as HRW’s current director Kenneth Roth explained, to identify specific violators and perpetrators. Human rights NGOs flourished in a period of neoliberal ascendancy, in which Hayek’s contention that it was meaningless to declare that ‘everyone’ was entitled to food, housing, clothing and medical care had begun to seem self-evident.
In stark contrast, in the late 1940s, delegates charged with drafting an international bill of rights depicted social and economic rights as evidence of the social progress won by workers’ movements. Rights to work, leisure, social security and a ‘decent standard of living’, as the Ecuadorian delegate put it, were the ‘real triumph of the twentieth century’.10 China’s P. C. Chang warned that neglecting ‘freedom from want’ would produce a document that would ‘ill accord with the times’.11 Chile’s Hernán Santa Cruz, a tireless advocate of social and economic rights, argued for adjusting production and distribution to secure general welfare, in order to transform ‘the political democracy of the nineteenth century into an economic democracy’.12 Defenders of social and economic rights stressed the need to go beyond the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, which Hayek’s mentor Ludwig von Mises termed ‘the programme of the liberal philosophy of the State’.13 Following Marx’s notorious critique of the egoism of the rights of man, the Yugoslav delegate argued that the 1789 Declaration treated ‘man’ as an isolated individual independent of his social conditions.14
Few delegates outside the Soviet bloc endorsed this same delegate Ljubomir Radovanovic’s argument that the French Revolution had abolished feudal slavery only to ‘reintroduce slavery within the framework of a new social capitalistic order’.15 But the majority agreed that a twentieth-century rights declaration must offer protection from the ‘dependence and economic subjugation’ of a capitalist market.16 Meeting in the wake of the Great Depression, they were deeply aware of what the republican political theorist Hannah Arendt termed ‘the terrifying predicament of mass poverty’.17 The previous decades had made clear that individual effort and personal responsibility were painfully inadequate in the face of mass unemployment and social dislocation – and that state inaction risked fostering rebellion. The rise of socialism and communism had placed ‘the social question’ on the international political agenda – including at the United Nations.
Nonetheless, there was less ‘unanimity as to the inclusion of economic and social rights in the Universal Declaration’ than the welfarist, postwar climate would suggest.18 Early in the drafting, the UK delegate defended his own country’s draft declaration, which contained no social and economic rights, by telling the assembled delegates that the ‘world needed freedom and not well-fed slaves’.19 In liberal societies, the delegate of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, Michael Klekovkin, shot back: ‘Men are free but are dying of hunger.’20 In a critique that resonated with that of the neoliberals, Charles Malik opposed social and economic rights because ‘the government controls that would be needed to realize these rights would mean the destruction of free institutions in a free world’.21
Дата добавления: 2021-01-21; просмотров: 77; Мы поможем в написании вашей работы! |
Мы поможем в написании ваших работ!