Negotiating universality – an introduction
On June 14, 1993, the Secretary-General of the United Nations Boutros
Boutros-Ghali delivered the opening address to the World Conference
on Human Rights held in Vienna. The world had undergone massive
political transformations in the preceding four years and the Vienna conference’s
purpose was to lay new foundations for international human
rights protection in the post–Cold War era. Since 1945, the evolution of
international human rights had been closely linked to the United Nations.
The Cold War and North–South debates had for almost fifty years determined
the uneasy existence of human rights at the United Nations.
Boutros-Ghali’s speech was a subtle reflection on these historical realities
and on the nature of human rights as he explained that:
Human rights should be viewed not only as the absolute yardstick which they
are, but also as a synthesis resulting from a long historical process. As an absolute
yardstick, human rights constitute the common language of humanity. Adopting
this language allows all peoples to understand others and to be the authors of
their own history. Human rights, by definition, are the ultimate norm of all
politics.
As an historical synthesis, human rights are in their essence, in constant movement.
By that I mean that human rights have a dual nature. They should express
absolute, timeless injunctions, yet simultaneously reflect a moment in the development
of history. Human rights are both absolute and historically defined.1
This was a paradoxical but honest assessment of a complex phenomenon
in international politics, diplomacy and law – a phenomenon that with
1 A/CONF.157/22: Address by the Secretary-General of the United Nations at the Opening
of the World Conference on Human Rights, June 14, 1993, p. 3.
1
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2 The Making of International Human Rights
the 1945 UN Charter had become a purpose and a vision to guide the
work of the United Nations. Boutros-Ghali gave an open invitation to the
historian to become engaged in understanding the role of human rights
in twentieth-century international politics. Human rights were after all
both absolute and timeless as well as historically defined and in constant
movement.
In recent years, human rights have become a rapidly expanding field of
historical research. Exciting new studies and interpretations have been put
forward. While I gratefully acknowledge the inspiration drawn from these
works, my research has guided me in a very different direction than recent
historiography. Jamaica and Liberia will therefore emerge in this work as
influential normative powers in twentieth-century politics, and I present
the duality of race and religion as the driving forces in the breakthrough
of international human rights law and politics. The 1960s will, crucially
and again diverging from the increasingly accepted narrative, feature as
the central period in this longer Cold War story combined with a new
emphasis on the significance of decolonization. What follows is the story
of these until-now, little-acknowledged players in a forgotten decade who
played such a decisive role in shaping our contemporary world. This calls
for elaboration.
Decolonization made a crack in the world running from South to
North and East to West. From this tectonic shift, the issue of human
rights emerged and over time achieved global prominence. This transformation
was not just a result of structural changes in the international
system of states: It was also a story of agency where the lead proponents
were, in fact, a group of states from the Global South that explored
and used this global transformation to reform the norms of international
society and create a platform for human rights in international politics.
It took time before this change became visible. The consequence of the
time lag was that the source of this tectonic shift remained hidden and
clouded our understanding of the emergence of human rights. The breakthrough
and trajectory of international human rights has been misdated
and misunderstood.
The decolonization process, described as the largest transfer of
sovereign power in the history of humankind,2
deserves greater attention
2 Jeffrey Herbst (2004), “Let Them Fail: State Failure in Theory and Practice,” When States
Fail: Causes and Consequences. Edited by Robert Rotberg. Princeton, NJ, p. 312; See
also James Sheehan (2008), Where Have All the Soldiers Gone? The Transformation of
Modern Europe. New York, p. 167.
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Negotiating universality – an introduction 3
not just as an essential part of the twentieth-century historical experience
but also for the emergence of human rights. It represented the transformation
from a world of empires to the world of quasi-functional sovereign
states we live in today.3
Decolonization transformed the normative backdrop
upon which human rights were projected on the world stage from
the 1940s and the decades that followed. In the hierarchical world of
empire, human rights had only a limited opportunity to shape global
politics. The notion of the universality of human rights was anathema to
this world system. After decolonization, human rights were negotiated
in a more horizontal system of states, at least in formal terms, and the
notion of universality now operated in a world where some of its most
powerful barriers had subsided. “Decolonization was a precondition that
‘Europe’ might again be associated with and worthy of an egalitarian
universalism” as Jan Werner-M¨uller rightfully observes in his study of
twentieth-century European political thought.4
Sovereignty still dominated; it actually expanded with decolonization
and remained a major barrier, but a structural change of the world system
had taken place and the transformation process was in itself significant for
human rights. The European imperial powers, among the most powerful
opponents of universality in the first two decades after the Second World
War, went through a political process that reformed their views on human
rights as they were increasingly liberated from their own empire in the
middle decades of the twentieth century. It transformed their approaches
to foreign policy and international human rights diplomacy. This was
not merely a journey of self-discovery. They were guided toward these
new positions. At the same time, and in a not unrelated process, the
United States confronted its own long-lasting and foundational tradition
of racism by disbanding the Jim Crow system of formalized racial
3 See Susan Pedersen’s work on the League of Nations: Susan Pedersen (2006), “The
Meaning of the Mandates System: An Argument,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft, vol.
32, pp. 560–582; Susan Pedersen (2015), The Guardians. The League of Nations and
the Crisis of Empire. Oxford, p. 13. See also Frederick Cooper (2005), Colonialism in
Question: Theory, Knowledge, History. Berkeley, CA, p. 231; Frederick Cooper (2014),
Citizenship between Empire and Nation. Remaking France and French Africa, 1945-
1960. Princeton, NJ; A. G. Hopkins (2008), “Rethinking Decolonization,” Past and
Present, vol. 200, no. 1, pp. 241–247; Matthew Connelly (2000), “Taking off the Cold
War Lens: Visions of North-South Conflict during the Algerian War for Independence,”
American Historical Review, vol. 105, no. 3, pp. 739–769; Christian Reus-Smit (2013),
Individual Rights and the Making of the International System, Cambridge, p. 161.
4 Jan-Werner M¨uller (2010), Contesting Democracy. Political Ideas in Twentieth-Century
Europe. New Haven, CT, p. 157.
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4 The Making of International Human Rights
segregation in the South – a century after slavery had been abolished with
the Civil War. The Communist regimes led by the Soviet Union believed
that the end of colonialism would deliver ideological gains, which it initially
did. They would, however, find themselves unable to reform their
societies as the norms of international society evolved over time. None
of the abovementioned states were at the vanguard of the rise of human
rights in the 1960s.
“The geography of international law” had changed, one diplomatic
observer noted in a significant 1962 UN debate on the future of law and
international relations.5
The 1960s were a decade where the colonial, the
anticolonial and the postcolonial met and overlapped. A large number
of new subjects of international law had emerged with the creation of
so many new states. Cold War ideological battles were extended to the
sphere of international law. A new approach to international relations
was one expression of the tectonic shift. Among the matter that emerged
from this shift was universality.
The new focus on the universality of human rights was supported
by two elements: an increased emphasis on universality as a principle
of international law and universality as a founding principle for the
type of international organization that the United Nations embodied. In
these processes, universality was promoted and contested, codified and
rejected – but above all it was negotiated. This is worthy of our attention.
Actually, it may be said that with the normative breakthrough for human
rights in the 1960s, the total of the United Nations as an international
organization during this decade proved to be more than the sum of its
parts. The lived experience of human rights in the member states with the
widespread violations during this era – and after – would support this
claim.
The hypothesis about this important connection between decolonization
and human rights provides a challenge to some of the existing literature.
From within postcolonial studies, human rights have been strongly
criticized, frequently linking human rights with Western essentialism and
neocolonialist agendas, but it may be that this critique has only been able
to sustain itself through its amnesia about the postcolonial moment, that
is, its own historical foundations. If a number of key countries from the
Global South were the driving force behind the breakthrough of universal
human rights, how Western, then, is the concept of human rights? There
5 Mr. Lannung (Denmark), UN General Assembly, 17th session, 756th meeting, November
9, 1962, p. 111.
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Negotiating universality – an introduction 5
remain important questions to be asked about how international human
rights emerged.
The emphasis on the link between human rights and decolonization
also calls for a word of caution. Decolonization was a multifaceted and
complex process, where its aspirations soon encountered harsh political
realities on a national, regional and global scale. What came to pass was
that “amidst one of the great political openings of the twentieth century,
the closures of a particular decolonization were becoming visible.”6
The
exercise of power soon manifested itself forcefully and repressively. My
intention has not been to overstate the nexus between human rights and
decolonization but that the nexus exists in a more refined way than
previously understood, and that it is important.
This becomes evident when recognizing that several developments in
late 1962 represented a crucial turning point that led to the breakthrough
for human rights law and politics. At this juncture, and in the aftermath
of the Cuban Missile Crisis in October, three major developments took
place at the United Nations that set human rights on a new political
trajectory.
The first development was that the UN human rights project that
had been faltering for a decade and a half was essentially reborn in late
1962 around the issues of race and religion. This brought a whole new
dynamic to the field as it reflected global political developments central
to this period and challenged and transformed East–West positions on
international human rights. This dynamic secured the breakthrough for
human rights to become international law.
The second development was that newly independent Jamaica joined
the United Nations at the 1962 UN General Assembly Session and immediately
initiated a process that provided a new and longer-term framework
for human rights to evolve and expand. In the process, Jamaica became
the major broker of progress on human rights in the 1960s, facilitating
important innovations in human rights politics – at the United Nations
and beyond – leaving a long-lasting and profound legacy.
The third development was that human rights became an integrated
component of broader international norm-making efforts. In 1962, the
UN initiated a process to elaborate “the principles of international law
concerning friendly relations and co-operation among states based on the
UN Charter.” It was part of a push from Communist states to promote
Nikita Khrushchev’s campaign for peaceful coexistence and have this
6 Frederick Cooper (2002), Africa Since 1940. The Past of the Present. Cambridge, p. 71.
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6 The Making of International Human Rights
notion reflected in international law. The outcome of this UN process,
which lasted from 1962 to 1970, was the foundational document for
the Helsinki Final Act. In subtle but important ways, it reflected human
rights principles that would facilitate the inclusion of human rights in
the 1975 Helsinki Final Act. If the Helsinki Final Act was instrumental
during the late 1970s in elevating human rights in international relations
and in inspiring activism, the backdrop for this development lies in the
1960s in a context rather different than the Conference on Security and
Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) and European d´etente.
Yet despite this, the 1960s has remained almost a forgotten decade in
human rights historiography.7
The primary focus has been on the 1940s
and the early rise of human rights. More recently, the 1970s has emerged
as the other period at the center of attention for human rights history.8
In two recent major international anthologies on postwar human rights,
there is only one out of thirty articles that focuses on the 1960s.9
There are obvious reasons for the focus on the 1940s and the 1970s.
The 1940s saw the development of the milestone document that shaped
the field, namely the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights.10
The 1970s saw the global embrace of human rights by numerous international
and national NGOs, forging a number of social movements. In
response to the alleged human rights breakthrough in the 1970s, it is
7 One notable exception is Roland Burke (2010), Decolonization and the Evolution of
International Human Rights. Philadelphia, PA.
8 See Samuel Moyn (2010), The Last Utopia. Human Rights in History. Cambridge, MA;
Michael Cotey Morgan (2010), “The Seventies and the Rebirth of Human Rights,”
The Shock of the Global. The 1970s in Perspective. Edited by Niall Ferguson et al.
Cambridge, MA, pp. 237–250; Akira Iriye, Petra Goedde and William I. Hitchcock
(eds.) (2012), The Human Rights Revolution: An International History. Oxford; Jan
Eckel and Samuel Moyn (eds.) (2012), Moral f¨ur die Welt? Menschenrechtspolitik in
den 1970er Jahren. Freiburg; Barbara Keys (2014), Reclaiming American Virtue. The
Human Rights Revolution of the 1970s. Cambridge, MA.
9 See Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann (ed.) (2011), Human Rights in the 20th Century. Cambridge;
and Iriye, Goedde and Hitchcock, The Human Rights Revolution. The article is
by Barbara Keys on Greece and antitorture politics in the late 1960s and early 1970s
(Barbara Keys (2012), “Anti-Torture Politics: Amnesty International, the Greek Junta,
and the Origin of the Human Rights ‘Boom’ in the United States,”). The claim is made
in a couple of other instances that an article covers the 1960s but the actual text and
footnotes reveal a different story. The editors of The Human Rights Revolution write
that human rights “became a major concern in international politics in the 1960s and
1970s,” but they have done little to address this conclusion about the 1960s in the edited
volume. See “Introduction,” p. 5.
10 For a recent take on this history, see Christopher N. J. Roberts (2015), The Contentious
History of the International Bill of Human Rights. Cambridge.
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Negotiating universality – an introduction 7
important to emphasize that while it was significant that international
NGOs advocated for and media disseminated news features on human
rights worldwide, it was equally significant when states negotiated – in
this case, several binding human rights treaties – and concluded them. On
the latter point, there was a definite breakthrough in the 1960s.
Until the early 1960s, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights carried
limited weight in international politics. There was, however, one
area in which the Universal Declaration played a concrete role. It had
become an important source of inspiration in the drafting of constitutions
in newly emerging states. By the early 1960s, the Declaration, for
example, had been applied in the drafting of constitutions in more than
twenty African countries.11
By 1962, as the UN human rights project
still floundered, there was a lesson to be learned from this development:
Human rights were coming in from the South.
The breakthrough occurred rapidly. In July 1963, a legal advisor in the
U.S. State Department wrote about the Commission on Human Rights
and its “prolonged effort expended on human rights covenants which
may never be completed and which, if completed, may never be widely
ratified as treaties.”12
Three years later, at the end of 1966, three major
human rights treaties had been completed, with ratifications already having
occurred for the International Convention on Elimination of All
Forms of Racial Discrimination adopted in December 1965. It was this
Convention and the race issue itself that enabled the completion in 1966
of the two Covenants on civil and political rights and on economic, social
and cultural rights that by then had been underway for eighteen years.
“Treaties reflect politics,” writes Beth Simmons in her influential book
Mobilizing for Human Rights.13
It is therefore relevant to try and understand
the nature of these political developments. The story seen from the
perspective of 1962’s influence begets quite a different historical context,
with a different set of actors and a different trajectory and causalities
regarding the human rights breakthrough than those stories focusing on
11 Egon Schwelb (1963), Human Rights and the International Community. Chicago, IL,
p. 51; See also Charles O. H. Parkinson (2008), Bills of Rights and Decolonization. The
Emergence of Domestic Human Rights Instruments in Britain’s Overseas Territories.
Oxford.
12 Document 258, “Memorandum From the Deputy Legal Advisor of the Department of
State (Meeker) to the Assistant Secretary of State for International Organization Affairs
(Cleveland),” July 16, 1963, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1961–1963, Vol.
25, p. 573.
13 Beth Simmons (2009), Mobilizing for Human Rights: International Law in Domestic
Politics. Cambridge, p. 12.
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8 The Making of International Human Rights
the 1940s and the 1970s. It also connects these three periods in a way that
is unseen in existing human rights research. The book thereby addresses
significant gaps in the research literature and in our knowledge of how
human rights evolved in the post-1945 era.
The existing human rights literature is extremely comprehensive and
covers a wide range of disciplines. It is impossible here to do justice to the
research field. Since 2010, the discipline of history has been one of the
most vibrant contributors to human rights scholarship, with an outburst
of new research. This comes on the back of previous work by scholars
such as Paul Gordon Lauren, Johannes Morsink and others published
during the 1980s and 1990s.14
During the 2000s, but before the recent
boom, important contributions were made by scholars including A. W.
Brian Simpson, Mary Ann Glendon, Lynn Hunt and Jay Winter.15
Susan
Waltz placed particular emphasis on the role of small states, especially
in the drafting of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights.16
Their contributions stand out as important independent works and offer
different perspectives to the strong focus on the 1970s in the recent historiography
since 2010.17
One of the limitations of this literature is a
14 See, for example, Paul Gordon Lauren (1983), “First Principles of Racial Equality: History
and the Politics and Diplomacy of Human Rights Provisions in the UN Charter,”
Human Rights Quarterly, vol. 5, no. 1, pp. 1–26; Paul Gordon Lauren (1998), The
Evolution of International Human Rights: Visions Seen. Philadelphia, PA; Johannes
Morsink (1999), The Universal Declaration of Human Rights: Origins, Drafting and
Intent. Philadelphia, PA; Gudmundur Alfredsson and Asbjørn Eide (1999), The Universal
Declaration of Human Rights: A Common Standard of Achievement. The Hague.
15 A. W. Brian Simpson (2001), Human Rights and the End of Empire. Britain and the
Genesis of the European Convention. Oxford; Mary Ann Glendon (2001), A World
Made New. Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. New
York; Lynn Hunt (2008), Inventing Human Rights. A History. New York; Jay Winter
(2008), Dreams of Peace and Freedom: Utopian Moments in the 20th Century. New
Haven, CT. See also Micheline Ishay (2004), The History of Human Rights. From
Ancient Times to the Globalization Era. Berkeley, CA.
16 See Susan Waltz (2001), “Universalizing Human Rights: The Role of Small States in the
Construction of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” Human Rights Quarterly,
vol. 23, no. 1, pp. 44–72; Susan Waltz (2002), “Reclaiming and Rebuilding the History
of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” Third World Quarterly, vol. 23, no. 3,
pp. 437–448; Susan Waltz (2004), “Universal Human Rights: The Contribution of
Muslim States,” Human Rights Quarterly, vol. 26, no. 4, pp. 799–844. I believe there
is better evidence for Waltz’s goal of placing due emphasis on the contributions of nonWestern
states to the evolution of human rights in the diplomatic processes studied in
the present book.
17 There are several excellent historiographical essays about human rights history. See, for
example, Reza Afshari (2007), “On Historiography of Human Rights Reflections on
Paul Gordon Lauren’s The Evolution of International Human Rights: Visions Seen,”
Human Rights Quarterly, vol. 29, no. 1, pp. 1–67; Stefan-Ludwig Hoffman (2011),
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Negotiating universality – an introduction 9
limited awareness of the 1960s’ human rights foundations on which the
1970s’ developments rest.
Roland Burke’s excellent 2010 book Decolonization and the Evolution
of International Human Rights is one of very few books that address
the 1960s in some detail. It provides a comprehensive and insightful
overview of Third World diplomacy from the 1955 Bandung Conference
to the 1968 World Conference for Human Rights held in Tehran. The
book is particularly strong in addressing the nuances of the debates at
the United Nations as well as the later “rise of cultural relativism” as
a challenge to human rights.18
It does not, however, capture important
catalytic factors such as the strategic impact of the race–religion equation
and the nuances of the five-year Jamaica-led preparation process
for the 1968 human rights year and what this also says about the role
of the Global South. Daniel Whelan’s book Indivisible Human Rights,
also from 2010, captures similar themes, providing a rich account of the
drafting of the Human Rights Covenants at the United Nations and offering
a long-term perspective from 1945 to 2009 on the development of
a key conceptual and political dimension of international human rights
thinking. However, its thematic focus also carries a limitation: The 1960s
receive limited treatment despite the fact that 1968 is presented as a turning
point in how the understanding of the indivisibility of human rights
evolved.19
The UN Intellectual History Project produced ten volumes from 2004
to 2009 on a whole range of topics that have been key in the UN’s work
since 1945, including a book on the history of Human Rights at the UN.
It is a rich, comprehensive and informative work that unfortunately manages
to largely ignore the 1960s – apart from twelve pages on the Convention
on Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination20
– thereby
“Introduction: Genealogies of Human Rights,” Human Rights in the 20th Century.
Edited by Stefan-Ludwig Hoffman. Cambridge, pp. 1–26; Philip Alston (2013), “Does
the Past Matter: On the Origins of Human Rights,” Harvard Law Review, vol. 126,
no. 7, pp. 2043–2081. See also Abigail Green (2014), “Humanitarianism in NineteenthCentury
Context: Religious, Gendered, National,” The Historical Journal, vol. 57, no.
4, pp. 1157–1175. For an excellent piece on historiography focusing on the United
Nations see Sunil Amrith and Glenda Sluga (2008), “New Histories of the United
Nations,” Journal of World History, vol. 19, no. 3, pp. 251–274.
18 Burke (2010), Decolonization and the Evolution of International Human Rights, p. 113.
19 Daniel J. Whelan (2010), Indivisible Human Rights. A History. Philadelphia, PA.
20 Roger Normand and Sarah Zaidi (2008), Human Rights at the UN: The Political History
of Universal Justice. Bloomington, IN, pp. 260–272. For a separate work that constitutes
a broad UN history, see Mark Mazower (2012), Governing the World: The History of
an Idea, 1815 to the Present. New York.
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10 The Making of International Human Rights
providing a rather limited view of a critical and transformative period for
the UN and for the subject matter of the book. More recently, Jan Eckel’s
Die Ambivalenz des Guten, from 2014, which focuses on human rights
in international politics since the 1940s, has provided a wide-ranging and
detailed study. In a 900-page book on this topic, the 1960s can hardly
be avoided. The book does cover issues such as decolonization, the case
against the Greek military Junta in the European regional human rights
system from 1967, the evolution of Amnesty International and importantly
the debates about the creation of an inter-American human rights
system during the 1960s; but despite giving attention to several relevant
developments during the decade, Eckel still argues that the UN human
rights agenda focused almost exclusively on condemning colonialism and
on racial discrimination.21
I hope to show in this book why this perception
deserves to be nuanced.
In his 2013 book Individual Rights and the Making of the International
System, Christian Reus-Smit argued that there was a discrepancy between
studies of decolonization and human rights. Decolonization studies seldom
mentions the politics of human rights and “histories of the international
human rights regime ignore, to all intents and purposes, the politics
of decolonization.”22
Reus-Smit’s provides an accurate analysis of the
reasons for this, namely a deeply ingrained but problematic assumption
“that if decolonization was about rights, it was about collective rights not
individual rights; and that the international codification of human rights
was a Western project.”23
The limited historiography that has grappled
with the nexus between human rights and decolonization has tended to
focus on the right to self-determination, rejecting the idea that human
rights were central to the anticolonial movements.24
Self-determination
21 The quote in German reads: “so stand die Menschenrechtsagenda der Vereinten Nationen
in den sechziger Jahren praktisch ausschliesslich im Zeichen der Verurteiling von
Kolonialismus und Rassendiskriminierung,” see Jan Eckel (2014), Die Ambivalenz des
Guten. Menschenrechte in der internationalen Politik seit den 1940ern. G¨ottingen,
p. 263.
22 Reus-Smit (2013), Individual Rights and the Making of the International System,
p. 152.
23 Ibid., p. 152. It is a little paradoxical that Reus-Smit builds his analysis mainly through
the traditional focus on the right to self-determination – which in his view universalized
sovereignty – since the scope of Global South human rights engagement went well
beyond this issue and that the broader focus more significantly substantiates the point
about the nexus between decolonization and human rights that Reus-Smit argues.
24 See Moyn (2010), The Last Utopia, pp. 84–119; Samuel Moyn (2012), “Imperialism,
Self-Determination, and the Rise of Human Rights,” The Human Rights Revolution.
Edited by Akira Iriye, Petra Goedde and William I. Hitchcock, Oxford, pp. 158–178;
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