What Rawls Hath Wrought

What Rawls Hath Wrought

Mini Teaser: The human-rights movement is nothing more than an unattainable utopian dream used to justify moral ends through ruinous wars of intervention.

by Author(s): John Gray

Indeed, for many in the period from the 1950s up to the 1970s, when human rights acquired their present focus on the moral claims of individuals, rights had meaning only in the context of a sovereign state. The full interpretation of equating human rights with a fundamental entitlement to national self-determination—the collective right to rule oneself and not be controlled by others—emerged only with the anticolonial movement. When the UN endorsed the Declaration on the Granting of Independence of Colonial Countries and Peoples in 1960, human rights and national self-determination became practically equivalent. At this point, the question of whether human rights were better protected in postcolonial regimes lost much of its meaning. Since the most fundamental freedom had been secured by the fact of independence, anything else was secondary.

 

IT IS partly the loss of the insight that human rights can only be secured by an effective state that explains the failure of the regime-change policies promoted by neoconservatives and liberal hawks over the past decade. If rights are what humans possess in the absence of a repressive regime, all that needs to be done to secure human rights is to remove the despot in question. But if rights are empty without the state to protect them, then the nature of the government that can be reasonably expected to emerge when tyranny has been overthrown becomes of crucial importance. The political ideas that are taught in universities do not often shape political practice in any direct fashion. But there can be little doubt that those who promoted the Iraq War believed the removal of Saddam Hussein would allow something like liberal democracy to flourish in the country, and in believing this, they showed that their thinking had been molded by theories of rights that ignored the crucial role of the state.

A willed ignorance of history was also at work. If rights are universally human, embodying a kind of natural freedom that appears as the accretions of history are wiped away, the past has little significance. But if human rights are artifacts that have been constructed in specific circumstances, as I would argue, history is all-important; and history tells us that when authoritarian regimes are suddenly swept aside, the result is often anarchy or a new form of tyranny—and quite often a mix of the two.

Breaking up systems of colonial or despotic power may be a requirement of justice and humanity, but it often goes with violent conflict and ethnic cleansing. A scenario of this kind has been enacted in post-Saddam Iraq. Constructed from provinces of the Ottoman Empire and containing populations with a long history of enmity, Iraq could not be democratized without a high risk of intercommunal conflict and a near certainty of Kurdish secession. So much was obvious to Gertrude Bell, the British civil servant who more than anyone else created the state of Iraq, when she argued in the early twenties that power must be kept in the hands of the Sunnis, despite their smaller numbers, “otherwise we will have a theocratic state, which is the very devil.” The current regime in Iraq—an unstable combination of popular theocracy with anarchy—would not have surprised her. What Bell could not have anticipated, but what was clear by the time of the invasion in early 2003, was that the destruction of Saddam’s tyranny would empower Iran, which is rapidly emerging as the principal state builder in the country.

Unlike Iraq, which under Saddam’s rule was a variety of present-day dictatorship, Afghanistan has never been ruled by a modern state. Even the writ of the Soviets, who during their period of occupying the country exercised power with a degree of ruthlessness unimaginable for coalition forces today, did not run much beyond the capital. Now Afghanistan is not so much a failed state as a pseudostate, in which power rests with tribes, warlords and drug dealers. The belief that human rights can be secured in these conditions is even more delusional than in the case of Iraq. Whatever else happens after the bulk of allied troops withdraw, the Taliban will be a potent presence in any government that is formed. Even if the pretense of democratic institutions is maintained, vital freedoms—not least of all for women, who have already been compromised by the Karzai regime—are likely to be extinguished altogether. Democracy cannot protect human rights when the most powerful political forces in the country reject them as illegitimate.

Of course, there were other reasons for intervention in Iraq apart from the defense of human rights, and the unhappy Afghan drift from an initially legitimate, limited and successful operation to destroy terrorist bases to the present inchoate mission is partly explained by geopolitical factors. But the fact remains that regime change in both countries was supported in Western states in part because it was believed intervention could promote human rights. If failure was predictable in each case, what accounts for Western elites supporting the use of force to achieve objectives that clearly could not be realized?

The answer, Moyn suggests, is in the fact that the idea of rights has seized hold of the utopian imagination. Human rights provide “a moral alternative to bankrupt political utopias”—a replacement for the universal political projects that shaped much of the dark history of the twentieth century. The human-rights movement shared the vision that fueled utopian politics—not just the anticapitalist politics of old-fashioned Communist parties, but also internationalist and anticolonialist movements, liberation theology and vain attempts to forge “socialism with a human face.” Communist rule proved to be unprecedentedly tyrannical, postcolonial regimes were sometimes as repressive as their predecessors and even heroic dissidents against totalitarian rule (such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn) were not always the liberals that Western supporters imagined them to be. Real-world politics never delivered the utopian dream, so human-rights activists insulated themselves from these disillusioning facts by assuming a moral stance that affected to transcend politics. Not having to make the painful choices and shabby compromises that always go with active political engagement, they could enjoy an uplifting sense of moral purity along with the comforting conviction that if anything went wrong, it was not their fault.

 

MOYN’S ACCOUNT of the utopian origins of the contemporary human-rights movement is impressively worked out and largely convincing. But it fails to capture what is truly unrealistic in the human-rights project, and as a result underestimates the damaging effects of its ascendancy. Like many writers on utopian movements today, Moyn shrinks from attacking the impulse that inspires them. Instead, anxious to pay his respects to the movement, he writes:

To give up church history is not to celebrate a black mass instead. I wrote this book out of intense interest in—even admiration for—the contemporary human rights movement, the most inspiring mass utopianism Westerners have had before them in recent decades.

One reason for Moyn’s positive evaluation of the human-rights movement comes from his partial understanding of utopianism. Its agenda, he writes, “is a recognizably utopian program: for the political standards it champions and the emotional passion it inspires, this program draws on the image of a place that has not yet been called into being.”

The core of utopianism, however, is not in the fact that the world it envisions is as yet nonexistent. Antislavery movements are sometimes invoked with the aim of showing that utopianism can have positive results. But however difficult they may have been to achieve, the goals of abolitionists were in no sense unachievable. We know that a society without slavery is possible, if only because history (ancient and modern) contains numerous examples of such places. A project is utopian when it can be known in advance that its central objectives cannot be realized. This may be because these aims are impossible in any human society, or because they cannot be achieved in particular communities in any future that can reasonably be anticipated. Marx’s Communism belongs in the first category, along with Lenin’s Bolshevism. The attempt to install liberal democracy in Iraq, or a modern state in Afghanistan, belongs in the latter, as did the attempt to export a Western-style market economy into post-Communist Russia. Again, though I cannot argue the point here, I am confident that the belief that China will eventually adopt something like a Western mode of government is no less utopian.

It is worth noting that the distinction between two types of utopianism has nothing to do with the familiar polarity of reform and revolution. Sometimes—as in Communist Eastern Europe—revolution is necessary in order to achieve piecemeal change. Equally, a project can be utopian when its advocates believe it can be achieved incrementally. Debates about gradual improvement or total transformation are just a distraction. The question is whether the goals of the project are possible at all, and here the human-rights movement is utopian in both senses of the term.

If securing rights presupposes an effective state, as early modern thinkers acknowledged and contemporary liberals have forgotten, the human-rights agenda is plainly utopian in much of the world. Many of the nearly two hundred actually existing sovereign states are collapsed, corroded, criminalized or weak. Incapable of maintaining a rudimentary peace, the task of sustaining a government, let alone rights, is beyond their competence. Contemporary human-rights movements have followed recent liberal philosophy in focusing on states as the principal violators of personal liberties; but in many countries it is tribal militias, organized crime or violent fundamentalists that are the larger threat. Anarchy is as inimical to freedom as tyranny, sometimes more so. That is one reason why regimes of the kind that exist in post-Communist Russia and China have secured a certain popular legitimacy.

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