Human Rights and the Uses of History. Samuel Moyn
for which history offers little validation because it is so new. If study of the past is useful at all in coming to terms with what happens today in the name of timeless and universal values, it suggests the reinvention of our movement in the name of a more just world. Human rights have so far done too little to bring that world about, which leaves a task beyond interpreting the past: crafting the future.
These chapters make particularly vivid the intersection of the writing of human rights history with America’s politics of liberal internationalism, which rose after the horrors of the Vietnam War in tandem with the search for a new geopolitical role for the country. Invented just before the end of the Cold War, liberal internationalism surged in the decade after, with massive consequences for history. The search for the origins of human rights is a by-product of the end of the Cold War—more specifically, the temporary age between the bipolar standoff of the past and the multipolar struggle of the future. During what now seems a brief post–Cold War interregnum that will not last long, human rights looked to a great many like a concept that could bridge the distance between unipolarity and humanity itself. If there is a common thread in what follows, it is that liberal internationalism has both motivated and misled our inevitable conversation with the past about what to think and how to proceed now—not least because America’s unipolar moment seems set to wane. The history of human rights first emerged as something like the history of American morals, analogous to texts that Victorians once wrote to assess how far they had come and to stabilize the self-regard of their civilization even as the threats began to lurk that would soon engulf them in catastrophe and decline. Now it looks like the confused early epitaph of a giant entering senescence.
The evidence from the past for the centrality of human rights to the new liberal internationalism is hardly promising. The ancient past from the Greeks and the Bible on hardly provided plausible sources, but then it has always been easy to update the myth of “Western civilization” to suit momentary agendas. The Atlantic revolutions did not serve much better, notwithstanding President Jimmy Carter’s rousing assertion in his farewell address to the country: “America did not invent human rights,” he noted, introducing a theme repeated in variation by every president since. “In a very real sense, it is the other way round. Human rights invented America.”4 Yet especially in the origins of America (not to mention France), rights had originally been a revolutionary conception, authorizing violence if necessary, and for the sake of national liberation. In the recent search for a usable past under the auspices of America’s liberal internationalism, however, the revolutionary origins of rights have been domesticated and the primarily statist and nationalist associations rights maintained for most of modern history were quietly dropped. The first chapter of this collection, on the book by Lynn Hunt on the revolutionary origins of human rights that has done most to define the field, pursues these troubling reinventions.
Worse yet, the British empire against which American revolutionary rights were originally asserted became a prized source for the new human rights history in the age of American liberal internationalism—and perhaps not surprisingly, since Great Britain did have its own early version of liberal internationalism, corrupted though it was by formal imperialism. In fact, humanitarianism and rights rarely crossed into (let alone defined) each other in the hierarchical global order and world visions of the nineteenth century. But an imperial rhetoric of fellow-feeling benevolence sometimes associated with Great Britain’s global preeminence has been explicitly revived in human rights history as template and threat. On the one hand, it is a model in which uplifting moralizing seems often taken at face value—as if the British Empire’s leading role in combating the slave trade or targeting other people’s violence in early humanitarian intervention were worth dusting off now, without reflecting on their congenital impurity first. On the other, it is a hazard in which Britain’s high-minded excuses for violent rulership show why its record has to be treated as a cautionary tale that the less self-interested and more authentically humane American hegemony will avoid.
Several of the chapters consider the British Empire as a source of human rights and a comparative template for liberal internationalism today. I reach the position that it is misleading to treat the British imperial past as a museum of horrors from which a few masterpieces are to be salvaged today to mount on our own walls. In part, the reason is that it is wrong to regard writing history as a project of moral connoisseurship allowing past enterprises to be saved from their own times. But in part, the reason is that there is no absolute way to distinguish between their maleficent empire and our benevolent hegemony; and if so, our desire to admire the good parts of a past we otherwise abhor in order to smuggle them across a neatly marked border can never be fulfilled. There is little interest in unmasking liberal internationalism as an imperialism that dare not speak its name. But by the same token, the relationship between the past and present is far too murky to allow simple reclamation of its good things, while exempting ourselves from its abhorrent violence.
Not all Americans are liberal internationalists, and it would clearly be wrong to reduce the uses and abuses of history within the field of human rights to this framework. And I am myself of course subject to the maxim that all history is contemporary history. Reviewing these chapters, it is clear to me how deeply I have responded, in the years since the search for the origins of human rights began, to a specifically American vision of liberal internationalism that the end of the Cold War seemed to anoint as the framework for a human global order in the future. When I criticize others for keeping that dream alive rather than reflecting on the consequences of our experiences—notably but not exclusively in the Iraq war—for our original assumptions, I am clearly writing from a time-bound and local resistance to a central item in recent American intellectual history. More to the point, I am engaging as much in self-criticism as anything else, for few avoided the enthusiasm that the post–Cold War moment evoked through the dream of human rights.
That is why, unlike some harsher critics of human rights, I strive in this book to understand what made humanitarianism for Great Britain and human rights for the United States much more than rhetorics of global engagement. For one thing, neither country’s representatives could claim proprietary control over them, which could serve and have served to indict them and their projects as much as to serve those projects.
If those who invoke humanity always and simply are trying to cheat for the sake of narrow interests, as the great (though Nazi) jurist Carl Schmitt famously alleged, it would not explain why anyone ever believes in them, or why the regular response to ideological mobilizations of sentimental and ethical norms is new and sometimes more generous claims on human universalism. This book cynically punctures illusions, historical and political, but not in the name of cynicism. If humanitarianism had been purely rhetorical high-mindedness for Britain, or human rights were simply an apology for American power, they would never have become the highly mobile and contested categories they remain today.
For that reason, I have sought in and through historical commentary and scholarship to understand not simply the conditions in which human rights could play the role of post–Cold War creed for liberal internationalists but also how they might transcend that role. To do so, the specific historical role international human rights have taken on needs to be grasped—a project ill-served by associating them with violent revolution or imperialist humanitarianism. Not that there is no continuity in history, but these old projects do not repay the study they have attracted in the search for the origins of our highest moral beliefs and aspirational legal projects.
Instead, my argument insists on the need to look in a more recent time for the inception of international human rights politics. A last tranche of these essays touches on a contrast I have pursued at much greater length in The Last Utopia: between the 1940s when human rights fell on deaf ears, and the 1970s when they experienced their first global breakthrough. A summary piece presents my general reasoning in this regard. It bears the marks of the moment it was published, under Barack Obama’s first term as president and his decision (surprising and disappointing to some fervent enthusiasts) to give human rights norms a back seat as the global struggle against terrorism continued, albeit with some modest tweaks.
Given the risk of occluding the important fact that America in the 1970s came a few years late to the cause of universal human rights, especially at the level of social movements, a subsequent piece emphasizes how Amnesty International—at first a British and West European group—paved