The Politics of Human Rights. posted by Richard Seymour

The list of names is familiar enough: Bernard Kouchner, Adam Michnik, Jose Ramos-Horta, Joschka Fischer, Christopher Hitchens, Norman Geras etc. These are all, in various ways and to various degrees, former revolutionaries who have come to support US imperialism as the best means of terminating bestial regimes, rather than seeing that imperialism as a bestial regime in itself. There are various ideological reference points here: Kosovo, Rwanda and Srebrenica. The first, an example of successful 'surgical' military action stopping what is still referred to as "genocide", the second an example of the failure of non-intervention, and the third an example of belated intervention.

Stephen Holmes, writing for The Nation, has an occasionally sharp and insightful review of recent books by Paul Berman and David Reiff, a pair of 'humanitarian interventionists' currently being skewered by their own moralism. Of these two authors, Reiff seems to be much more interesting, and not only because he has flipped 180 degrees from being a fervent interventionist to professing that he is "no longer an interventionist". Holmes chastises Reiff for claiming that human rights is the new ideology of imperialism, but I happen to think that Reiff has a point, which I'll come to explaining. Holmes also regrets Reiff's point that many of those now opposed to the war would have supported it if Clinton was behind the wheel, and that part of what animates the softer antiwar liberals is a "narcissism of small differences". Again, I think Holmes is wrong and Reiff right. If Clinton had waged this war, or even Al Gore, there would have been a chorus of clucking liberal apologists much broader than that minute coalition of deluded former lefties that rallied behind Bush, and the example of Kosovo is instructive in that. Holmes objects to Reiff's assault on Samantha Powers, in which the former says Powers' arguments are "a recipe for a recapitulation in the twenty-first century of the horrors of nineteen-century colonialism." Reiff is right, but perhaps for the wrong reasons.

The trouble with human rights, then. In itself, a codified set of rules about how human beings should be treated is both valuable and necessary. However, Reiff is right that human rights as a discourse was appropriated by imperialism, and the reason it could do this is that it attempts to ground politics in something essentially apolitical. Bernard Kouchner argues that "Everywhere, human rights are human rights. Freedom is freedom. Suffering is suffering." Political contexts are eschewed, and instead shocking instances of brutality are interpreted as attesting to something constant in human nature that must be suppressed in various ways - usually be reducing the political sphere, since it is precisely in the domain of democratic possibility that governments can be beholden to 'special' interests rather than universal ones. Human rights posits a passive, rather than an active subject, one capable of pain and suffering, but not of resistance and insurgency. It is a profoundly pessimistic and therefore conservative view of human nature. ("[H]umans need to be restrained from their inner darkness" according to Anthony Langlois.) It is, as Badiou argues, a nihilist doctrine in that the only thing that can really happen to one in the ethical discourse is death. It is Hobbesian in its political purview, inasmuch as human potency is seen as essentially negative and in need to subjection to powerful exiguous constraints. John Wadham of Liberty argues that "Elected parliaments in this country and around the world have shown that, on their own, they are not able to protect human rights properly.". This lead him to call for removing the power to appoint judges from the elected government and place it in the hands of "an independent appointments committee".

In this sense, the distance between 'realists' and 'idealists' is mainly fictitious: both share a view of human nature that is ultimately pessimistic and conservative. While the former privilege sovereignty as a means of structuring (and therefore limiting) international conflict, the latter take the Hobbesian step much further and reach for a globalised Leviathan, one whose awesome power can suppress and contain local conflict. (This happens to overcome a major conundrum in IR: why, if realists take their political doctrine from Hobbes, do they not go the essential step further and recommend a supranational Leviathan to manage 'anarchy'?) It is no accident that one of the major theorists of International Relations to demur from the classical conception of sovereignty, Stephen Krasner, is very close to the US government. Meanwhile, Niall Ferguson has argued that 'limited sovereignty' is often preferable to 'full sovereignty' in Iraq, due to the possibility of civil war and chaos. (Granted, he made that argument last year, but I bet he'd try it again if given the opportunity). Because, the abandonment or over-riding of state sovereignty in the present conjuncture can only mean the dictatorship of the powerful nations. The failure to investigate Nato crimes in Kosovo, which Human Rights Watch described as a "disturbing disregard for the principles of humanitarianism", renders the point absolutely eloquent.

Ultimately, the apologists for human rights imperialism prefer the Republic of Humanitarian Management to the Democracy of Risk. Hitchens' dinner-party ramblings, if the account of star-struck Michael Totten is accurate, are exemplary: he suggested that if Iraqis elected a new Taliban, the US would not let it take power. In a similar vein, he argued previously that he was glad that the secular forces had beaten the Islamists in Algeria during the 1990s. A war that had killed 100,000 people - often directly at the hands of Algerian security forces, often at the hands of the GIA, which many Algerian officials have suggested is the direct property of the intelligence services there - was initiated because the military overturned an election in which the Fronte Islamique du Salut actually appeared to be winning. Paddy Ashdown upholds the Republic of Humanitarian Management in Bosnia, exercising extraordinary colonial-style powers as he does so; Bernard Kouchner did the same in Kosovo until recently.

The invocation of 'risk' - the risk that Rwanda (but not the Congo, or Somalia, or Vietnam) might reappear - also provides a catch-all reasoning for war. Failure is simply impossible in the new human rights paradigm since, regardless of how many victims pile up, the absence of intervention would have led to a worse outcome. (And our bodies are always accidental, or the result of deviant action by individuals). The House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, while dismissing the idea that there was a Serb campaign of genocide in Kosovo, nevertheless insisted that the true issue was that Milosevic’s campaign would have continued for years if there had not been intervention, creating more death and instability than the bombing did. This provides excellent post facto cover for literally any outcome that you can imagine, except, perhaps, the death of every single Albanian at Nato hands which would, at any rate, still have been an accident, the result of a few miscreants… etc etc. Similarly, when there were calls for a cessation or pause in the bombing of Afghanistan because the interval for providing aid to those made homeless in the Winter was closing with potentially drastic results - up to 100,000 deaths - countless ‘humanitarian’ reasons were presented for the refusal to do so, including the prospect of the Taliban marauding triumphantly round the country, killing many more people than the bombers could. Once again, if 100,000 deaths as a result of Western action would not have invalidated the humanitarian reasoning for war, then nothing could. We are in a similar situation in Iraq today.

To put it another way, the rooting of a political doctrine - liberal internationalism - in 'human rights' has enormous human rights consequences in itself, not just in countries that happen to be invaded, but also in the loci of imperial power. Perhaps very few of the humanitarian imperialists would be so foolish as to defend the 'humanitarian' intervention that is murdering Haiti: for some, that is probably because perfidious France is involved. However, they do defend what often is a drastic contraction of the political sphere, relegating democratic rights to political rights. As such, their shared ideology involves a formally disavowed form of political reaction, and it is no surprise that Hitchens and Ferguson can agree about the limitations of sovereignty in Iraq, while diverse figures like Nils Roseman, Mary Kaldor, Michael Pugh and John Wadham can agree that democracy presents a threat to human rights that needs to be curtailed. Geoffrey Robertson and Max Boot agree that state rights are useless. All of these claims are codified in Tony Blair's Doctrine of the International Community, in which cosmopolitan human rights trump state rights (this was formulated in a 1999 speech, roughly a year after the bombing of Yugoslavia, during which interval international legal scholars had been busily padding out the new thesis).

Human rights as an ideology is a potent mobiliser of support for imperialist interventions and, as mentioned, a formidable guarantor of legitimacy. David Chandler, in his perspicacious book, (From Kosovo to Kabul: Human Rights and International Intervention, Pluto Press, 2002), has a better suggestion. The active subject must be re-emphasised. Mass politics must be reinvigorated, and we must make the most of "people's capacity for autonomy and collective rational decision-making, a capacity denied by the proponents of ethical regulation from above". In short, what we need is not the anodyne commitment to a minimal campaign to 'Protect the Human' as Amnesty International has it - we need a revolution.

Update: Rob has an excellent reply, which corrects some of my stick-bending (it also misses the point at times, but is still well worth reading).