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Democracy and Human Rights: Universal Values?
From: Cambridge University Press
| By:
Andrew Hurrell |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
Ideas of human rights and democracy are fundamental to Western political thought. But they do not necessarily hold in the Eastern paradigm. How, therefore, can we make the leap from relative to universal values? Andrew Hurrell of Oxford University examines the differing political values held by societies in the East and West, and looks for the balance between individual rights and social duties. |
 o what extent can democracy and human rights be understood as universal values? Is there today a solid consensus on the model of political development most likely to be protective of human rights? For most people human rights are inherently universal, concerned with protecting and furthering the dignity and worth of all human beings. We are unavoidably dealing with rights that are enjoyed simply by virtue of being human. Yet the universality of both the notion of human rights and the nature of human rights has been, and remains, highly contested. |
Positive developments
 On one side, universalists of an optimistic frame of mind can point to a number of positive developments. In the first place, they note the hardening of an impressive normative structure and agreed standards built around a commitment to universality. The human rights regime that has emerged in the period since the Second World War is global in at least two senses: first, that the individual and collective rights defined in the increasing number of international legal instruments are indeed held to apply to all human beings; and secondly, that the UN has played a central role in the process of standard-setting, promotion, and (to a clearly far less satisfactory extent) protection of human rights. Moreover, on most core rights the scope for governments to exempt themselves or to raise the old claim of unlimited sovereignty has gone, or been very heavily constrained. |
Secondly, they note the end of old divisions that marked the debates on human rights in the 1960s and 1970s: between East and West and between North and South. These involved clashes about the nature of rights but were of course embedded in bitter political rivalries and reflected a very wide-ranging desire to defend absolutist conceptions of sovereignty from encroaching international institutions and regimes. |
Thirdly, and even without accepting the more extreme forms of Western triumphalism, it is possible to argue that the position of Western values has undergone dramatic change--in relation to say the late 1970s at the height of the Third World challenge and at a time of re-emerging Superpower confrontation. In the political field, one can note the wave of democratisations of the 1980s and the extent to which many previous opponents of democracy have come to view political democracy as an intrinsic rather than an instrumental value. In the economic domain, this argument stresses the undermining of the challenges to liberal capitalism with the collapse of the socialist regime in the former Soviet Union. |
There is the widespread move away from statist, developmentalist thinking in very large parts of the developing world. One can observe the increasing power of the global economic system to homogenise the practical range of economic policies and, in effect, to make any notion of "opting out" of the global capitalist system all but impossible. And, finally, in the environmental field, the optimist can point to a gathering international consensus around the need for concerted international efforts to protect the environment and to the crystallisation in institutions and international agreements of new normative principles that have important implications for the human rights agenda--for example, the importance of transnational equity, of the rights of future generations, of the stewardship of biodiversity and the protection of indigenous cultures. |
The optimistic Western universalist is also likely to underscore the impact of "progressive enmeshment," developing the Kantian notion of a gradual but progressive diffusion of liberal values, partly as a result of liberal economics and increased economic interdependence, partly as a liberal legal order comes to sustain the autonomy of a global civil society, and partly as a result of the successful example set by the multifaceted liberal capitalist system of states. At one extreme, this has involved a strident reassertion of modernisation theories that stress both the convergence between societies and the links between economic and political liberalisation. But it is worth highlighting the extent to which weak versions of cultural relativism often accept these same assumptions--that the ideas of democracy and human rights are essentially a product of modernity and bound up with the development of the state and market; that allowances need to be made given the diversity of societies and levels of development; but that we can be reasonably hopeful that, in the long run, development and modernisation will work towards the diffusion of liberal values. |
Finally, and again without necessarily buying into more extreme forms of liberal globalisation, the universalist questions the essentialist vision of rigid and incommunicable cultures and stresses instead the fluidity and malleability of cultures and societies. On this view, it is highly doubtful that the world consists of a limited number of cultures each with its own indestructible and immutable core. If this is indeed not the case and if cultures develop and change over time, then values can be diffused and there is no reason in principle why European or Western human rights norms cannot be transferred effectively to other cultures. Given that all cultures are amalgams of various cultural components and influences, it is far from clear why Western ideas on human rights should remain permanently outside the experience of other cultures. After all, human rights were not some natural and inevitable product of Western culture but had to be consciously created, developed and extended--note the extent to which Western understandings of human rights have changed enormously in the course of the past two centuries. |
Rhetoric and reality
Yet this rather rosy picture omits a number of important features and challenges. The rhetoric of universalism is all too often contradicted by the very different constructions placed upon international agreements, by deep-rooted philosophical and cultural divergences over the meaning and significance of human rights, and by the widespread denial in practice of the very same rights that are so widely applauded in theory. |
Two classes of challenges are especially important and problematic. First are those that arise from the power of nationalist ideologies and the force of communitarian commitments. Human rights will always remain marginal for the nationalists who view the nation or the ethnic group as an objective phenomenon standing above the individual; who believe the character of all individuals to be shaped by, and only intelligible in the context of, the national group; who argue that loyalty to the nation overrides all other loyalties; and who preach an ethic of loyalty, belonging and sacrifice to the group or community. Global human rights will also remain insecure and uncertain for those, often liberal, communitarian theorists who believe that the survival and freedom of separate political communities represent the highest values of international society. |
Secondly, there are the regionalist challenges, most notably in the Islamic world and in Asia. Regionalism was built into the human rights system, but principally in terms of implementation--"the local carriers of a global message" to use John Vincent's apt phrase (John Vincent, Human Rights and International Relations, Cambridge University Press, 1986, p. 101). The rights themselves are universal, but their practical implementation would be more effective if devolved to the regional level. Thus we have seen a variety of regional human rights regimes in Europe, the Americas, Africa and the Arab world with differing degrees of institutionalisation (especially in terms of implementation) and, within the limits of global standards, some acknowledgement of cultural differences. |
As with co-operation more generally, so it is argued that greater social, political and economic homogeneity will make it easier to implement human rights at the regional level and make the inevitably increased intrusion into domestic affairs politically easier to accept. Thus, as in the areas of economics and security, there is a recurrent liberal vision of a productive partnership between the regional and the global and of the neat interlocking of regional political, security or economic co-operation within an overarching global order--a kind of interregional globalism. |
Yet the line between global promulgation and regional implementation has always been a problematic one and it is hardly surprising that regional human rights frameworks (tied to the broader resurgence of regionalism) have re-emerged as vehicles for the promotion of conflicting conceptions of human rights and conflicting views as to how those rights should be promoted. Thus, far from slotting nicely into a neat pattern of global subsidiarity, regionalism and regional co-operation may form the political framework for conflict over the definition of human rights and over the means by which they should be enforced internationally. |
East-West differences
Asia is the region in which the challenge to Western conceptions of human rights has been most systematically developed, in which political clashes have been most evident, and in which the "regionalist" focus has been most dominant. Here it is extremely important to unpack and disentangle the various elements which together make up the "Asian challenge." Conflict over human rights is often presented by both sides (e.g. Huntington for the West and Kausikan for Asia) in essentialist terms (see Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations, Simon & Schuster, 1997; Bilahari Kausikan, "Asia's different standard," Foreign Policy 92 (1993), pp. 24-41). On the critical side, there is the official Asian rejection of Western claims that effective and open markets, restrictions on state power and the strengthening of civil society work naturally to promote both economic success and Western-style political liberalism. |
On the more constructive side, there is the idea of a distinctive Asian approach to human rights built around the idea of "shared values": a different conception of the relationship between the individual and the state; respect for the community; the central importance of the duties that individuals owe towards the group; and the particular differences that follow from these values in terms of freedom of speech and freedom of association. "Nation before community and society before self," as the 1991 Singapore White Paper expressed it. Or, as Kishore Mabhubani put it in 1995, drawing out the relationship between human rights and power: "All human rights covenants were created when the West was in power. In the future, these agreements will assert the rights of society over the rights of individuals" (quoted in Michael Leifer, "Tigers, tigers spurning rights," Times Higher Education Supplement, 21 April 1995, p. 16). |
Yet it is far from clear just how much of the conflict concerns divergences over the meaning of human rights that are rooted in cultural or civilisational distinctiveness. In the first place, it is important to note the diversity of voices within this allegedly coherent regionalist construction: the diversity of cultures and cultural traditions; the equally wide range of economic and political systems; the tremendous pace of social and economic change that is transforming societies and remoulding traditions; the fact that several major states (most notably Japan) have kept their distance from the discussion of Asian values. Thus, even at the official level, notions of a unified and coherent set of Asian values need to be taken with a large pinch of salt. |
Beyond the level of governments, NGOs (non-government organisations) have propounded a very different message on human rights, upholding strong conceptions of universality, and arguing both for greater weight for civil and political rights and for social justice and grass-roots empowerment. Finally, as noted above, cultures are not best understood as closed and impermeable systems, and it is not clear that the substantive differences are as deep as often suggested. For example, the communitarian and social values of the Catholic and Christian Democratic tradition of human rights are just as much as part of the West as Anglo-American individualist liberalism. |
In addition, a great deal of the conflict over human rights in Asia has to do with traditional and straightforwardly political factors. In the first place, we are dealing with a very clear "statist" challenge that reflects a shift in relative political and economic power. These are mostly strong and economically successful states whose governments perceived in the aftermath of the Cold War and the Gulf War a unipolar moment in which the United States had emerged as the dominant power and which seemed to provide the basis for expanded Western hegemony. Thus the Clinton Administration's talk of "democratic enlargement" and the notion of giving "teeth" to the enforcement of human rights were widely perceived in the region as attempts to reassert US power and frustrate the reshuffling of the international hierarchy. On the economic side, this was expressed in the fear that the West was using human rights concerns as a cover for economic protectionism (e.g. developing new norms on workers' rights). Such concerns have been most clearly embodied in Mahathir's claim that the North is using human rights to counter the economic advantages and success of Asian newly industrialising countries. |
Political agendas
The overtly political character of the clash is also visible in the specific terms of the human rights debate. As the Bangkok Declaration made clear, official Asian resentment is as much about how human rights are to be implemented as it is over the content of the rights themselves. Hence the central defence of state sovereignty (widely shared across the region), the attacks on double-standards and conditionalities, and the calls for greater democratisation in international institutions. |
On one side, then, this has been a defensive response to an external challenge and, as in many other parts of the world, the external challenge has fed into debates about greater regional awareness: what it is to be part of Europe, the Americas or Asia? How it is that "we" are to be differentiated from "them"? But on the other side (and this is what makes Asia distinctive, certainly in comparison with other parts of the developing world) we find a strident and spirited assertion by increasingly self-confident Asian states (whose development owed very little to either democracy or the protection of human rights) that there are alternative frameworks for human rights and democracy. As Huntington's critics have argued, the clash between different cultural conceptions of human rights is maintained and manipulated by states as part of rather traditional power-political and mercantilist rivalry. These are strong states, not seeking to opt out, but rather to draw the line between integration and national autonomy in a different place to where many Western states would draw it. |
Secondly, there is the internal political dimension. This involves the narrow denial of human rights by regimes determined to consolidate their power domestically and prepared, if necessary, to trample on human rights in the process; the building-up of the discourse of Asian values and of a "threat" to those values as a means to increase political legitimacy; and the broader claim that ethnic and social tensions must not be allowed to undermine social cohesion and that the rampant individualism allegedly central to Western conceptions of human rights would lead precisely to this end. |
Thirdly, there is the developmentalist claim and the revival of the idea that economic development trumps Western liberal notions of civil and political rights. At one extreme (and still visible in Chinese official statements) there is the Marxist notion that bourgeois rights can mean nothing without an end to feudal and capitalist exploitation. But, more commonly, there is the argument, beloved of developmentalist states in the 1970s, that the Western emphasis on civil and political rights is "premature" and that economic and social rights must be upheld, and indeed strengthened by a right to development. As the critics rightly note, this kind of developmentalism provides an all-encompassing cloak for political repression. "Through the Declaration [of the Right to Development], Asian governments seek to promote the ideology of developmentalism, which justifies repression at home and the evasion of sovereignty abroad" (Yash Ghai, "Asian perspectives on human rights," in James Tang (ed.) Human Rights and International Relations in the Asia Pacific, Pinter, 1993, p. 59). But it is still important to note that this kind of argument does not necessarily imply that the eventual end-point is incompatible with Western conceptions of human rights and democracy. |
Conclusion
One basic point, then, is that there are many different things going on in the polemics on Asian values and that the exact extent to which these clashes actually reflect cultural and civilisational claims is both very hard to discern and almost certainly varies from case to case. Yet to recognise the multilayered character of the debate does not do away with the problem. Even if the challenge is political rather than cultural or civilisational, it is still powerful, with serious implications for both the international human rights regime and international efforts to promote democracy. In addition, even if manipulated and abused by governments, the Asian debate does highlight real and genuine conflicts over the nature of human rights, above all in terms of the value to be attached to community and the balance between individual rights and social duties. |
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