Ideal Illusions: How the U.S. Government Co-Opted Human Rights by James Peck

Ideal Illusions: How the U.S. Government Co-Opted Human Rights by James Peck

Author:James Peck [Peck, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Retail, Political Science
ISBN: 9780805083286
Publisher: Metropolitan Books
Published: 2010-01-01T15:00:00+00:00


“We feel your pain” was Clintonism not only at home. It was a call to mobilize around a politics of suffering and victimization, prompting the transformation of a humanitarian ethos into a fighting faith. Those who struggled against Communism had been able to identify a clear enemy behind much of the carnage in the world. Now at the end of the Cold War accounts of social injustice, poverty, and economic failure threatened to swamp Washington’s progressive globalism.25

Humanitarianism became the post–Cold War zeitgeist in part because it offered a response to the atrocities and “messiness” that the Cold War no longer explained. The Cold War had projected superpower conflicts into the remotest areas of the world, but it affirmed, at least outwardly, state sovereignty. Humanitarian interventionism, by contrast, was to blossom amid withering attacks on state sovereignty as it sought to root a penetrative dynamic of globalization in a rights-based, corporate-driven development process. The Cold War had condensed all the disruptive forces of an era into Communism and its support of nationalist and radical movements. It was an age of national self-determination, revolution, and anticolonial struggles. The new era was one of democratization, human rights, and humanitarianism. In the former era Washington organized half the planet; in the latter it sought to organize the whole.

For human rights leaders this development was more an opportunity than a problem. A “responsibility to protect,” the construction of a legal apparatus to try those guilty of genocide and war crimes of all kinds, and the promotion of humanitarian intervention to stop other atrocities all came together by the end of the decade. With no ideological alternatives at hand to rival an American-backed global economic order, and with local states weakened, rights advocates called for a vast new effort to infuse Clinton’s “democratic moment” with a more expansive vision of human rights. In the process, human rights became “one of the world’s dominant ideologies”26 and the movement itself more inclusive, developing, in the words of one Human Rights Watch official, into “a substantial mosaic that includes large professional NGOs as well as thousands of regional, national, and local organizations working on issues ranging from self-determination to the rights of children, and from access to HIV medications to the right to water.”27

Human rights, the theory went, are “universal”—they are what Americans embody and others have fought for. As Clinton put it, “There is no them; there is only us.”28 Making others into what they really wanted to become meant emancipation, not manipulation. Democratic forms might vary; the operations of the market economy might manifest themselves differently depending on levels of development. But rights were set forth in international law and shone with the clarity of law itself. No Cold Warrior ever envisioned fashioning such a penetrating ethos.

To the calls for democratization of earlier years was now added an even more morally imperative cry—the responsibility to protect the rights of others, wherever they might be, even if that meant waging war, and by so doing infusing human rights into traditional humanitarianism.



Download



Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.