Universal human rights, Justice and Transformation of International Order
The end of the Cold World represented a radical attempt to reshape the international order. With the triumph of the West in the global geopolitical struggle, western states have asserted more respect for human rights and democracy in their foreign policies than before. A new pattern of geopolitical order – the hegemony of 'transnational liberalism' - has emerged mainly dominated by the United States and its European allies. The claims of human rights and justice as universal values have emerged. In this essay, I would like to discuss about the role of human rights and justice in by using competing understandings of realism, liberalism, liberal theory of transformation and universalism concepts.
Concepts of Power
Power is an integral part of all politics. Professor Morgenthau (1948) argued all politics as a struggle for power and advocated the concept of power as the core of international politics. His view was challenged by the anti-power theory of international relations which emphasized the distinctions between power politics and some other kind of politics.
However, anti-power theory was of limited use because it only suggests how autocratic and democratic statesmen conduct foreign relations by other means and fails to identify what actually occurs in international politics. To analyze the relationships between and among states, Bromley (2004) categorized different kinds of power into distributive or coercive power and collective power as followed.
“Distributive power is the capacity of one party to get another to comply with its goals; power relations are hierarchical relations of super- and sub-ordination and power operates by imposing costs on others or by means of a credible threat to do so. For collective power, it is a property of a group of co-operating actors in which the total ability to effect favorable outcomes over and above that which could be achieved by each acting independently” (Bromley, 2004: 159)
As the universal human rights and justice claims have challenged and sustained some forms of power within and among states, the concepts of power can be used to analyze the role of these claims in changing the international order. To understand the processes of international interactions, the power relationships and the kind of order and disorder with which they are associated, various scholars have constructed models such as realism, liberalism and constructivism to characterize the international order to look at things in a more generalized way.
Realism
The core belief of realism is that self-interested states compete for power and security by using the instruments of military power and state diplomacy. Kenneth Waltz's Theory of International Politics is a touchstone in characterizing and modelling the international order because he develops a theory of the workings of international politics derived from a model of political structure based on a few assumptions by explicitly drawing on his own understandings of economic models.
The first assumption of this model is that the international political system is made up of sovereign states and there is no authority above the state. Therefore, the relationships between states are anarchic and its organizing principle is anarchy. The second assumption is that states should give overriding priority to survival and security because there is no authority to secure the survival of the individual states. Therefore, states should be concerned about the relative power, not absolute power.
By giving these assumptions, Waltz concluded some major points in characterizing the international order. He argued that states will be functionally equivalent and compelled by threat of extinction to act in similar ways. By assuming the world remains one of the independent states, he also draws the conclusion that change consists of shifts in the distribution of capabilities among the units. (Brown, 2004: 491) Furthermore, the distribution of power across the states system is the central dynamic feature so that the most powerful states can have an important role in shaping the international system. He also pointed the role of international institutions such as international law and the adherence of states of codes of rights as depending factors on the interests of the powerful states.
Overall, realists reject the role of sovereignty-free actors such as transnational organizations and Non-government organizations. However, they have some influences in the distribution of capabilities among the units so that alternative models are required in shaping the international order.
Liberalism
In contrast to realism, the core belief of liberalism is peace strengthened by democracy, economic links and international organizations. So the main instruments of liberalism are international institutions and global commerce. There are a variety of liberal models characterizing the international order. Among them, Andrew Moravcsik is an influential liberal scholar by restating liberalism as a paradigm of International studies.
In his liberalism as a model of international order, Moravcsik (1997) defined three analytical assumptions of liberalism. He claimed that the principal actors are individuals and private groups of individuals who use states to pursue their interests in material terms such as economic interests and ideal terms as fundamental beliefs. Moreover, it is argued that state preferences represent some sub-set of the interests of the individuals and groups within society and the ways states represent the dominant interests depend on the nature and institutions of the state. So these institutions are a 'transmission belt' between social actors and state policy. (Brown, 2004:110) Nevertheless, state's preferences are socially defined.
Moreover, he also drew the point that states' behavior is determined by the international configuration of state preferences across the states. So international order depends on the mix of different things that different states are pursuing as mentioned.
“Each state seeks to realize its distinctive preferences under varying conditions imposed by the preferences of other states” (Moravcsik, 1997: 520)
He then specified three categories of interdependence in terms of state preferences that can result in states exchanging policy concessions in return for realizing other aims such as where state preferences are coincident or the differences are insignificant to others, where states preferences are zero-sum or deadlocked and where there is a mixture of two. These categories are important because they can identify the extent of conflict or cooperation and the substance of those conflictual and cooperative relations. (Brown, 2004:497) So Moravcsik's model has been used by various scholars to identify changes in the international order.
Another ambitious liberal theorist that advocate the progressive transformation of the international order is Immanuel Kant (1795). He presented his proposal of perpetual peace for the international order as a universal theory.
Kant's liberal theory of transformation
In his work of 'Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch' (1795), Kant developed three definitive articles for perpetual peace such as
The civil constitution of of every state should be Republican
The law of nations shall be founded on a federation of free states and
The law of world citizenship shall be limited to conditions of universal hospitality (Kant, 1795, online reprinted)
The basic belief is that all men must adhere to some kind of civil constitution and any legal constitution conform to one of the three types based on the civil right of individuals within a nation, or the international right of states in their relationships with one another, or cosmopolitan right as individuals and states may be regarded as citizens of a universal state. (Kant, 1795, online reprinted)
He also believed that universal norms could be discovered by reason and perpetual peace might become a universal condition of humanity. He put forward the idea of cosmopolitan right as
'The idea of cosmopolitan right is a necessary complement to the unwritten code of political and international right, transforming it into a universal right of humanity'
(Kant, 1795, online reprinted)
Due to this universal character of reason, Kant's ideas remain important in the transformation of international order in a modern world.
Universalism
The universal character of reason of Kant's liberal theory is critical due to the creation of the potential for relations among different people to be transformed into universal relations ordered by cosmopolitan right. The questions about universality has been posed by several arguments based on different historical experiences and socio-cultural locations.
Distinguished by the senses, universalism can be categorized into two kinds of beliefs such as philosophical or metaphysical universalism or foundationalism and justificatory universalism. Foundationalism refers to the idea that there are bare facts about human nature (including human reason) and its place in the world that provide the basis for agreement among individuals about questions of truth, beauty and what is considered to be right or good; whereas, justificatory universalism refers to the idea that there is a normative content to human reason encompassing ' impartiality, objectivity, intersubjective verification of results, arguments and data, consistency of belief and self-reflexivity. (Benhabib, 2002:27) In short, justificatory universalism do not have presupposed fixed philosophical or metaphysical foundations like foundationalism.
Foundationalism holds that reasons rest on a foundational structure comprised of basic beliefs and examples include Hobbes's argument that everyone is capable of discerning the natural law and Kant's argument that all humans have an act on universalizable moral principles (Bromley & Smith, 2004: 543). In contrast, justificatory universalism is based on the common norms of rationality developed from the necessities of social life. As Hampshire (1999) suggested,
“people should think the reasoning typical of legal and moral disputes and disputes about evidence rather than the formal deductions and proofs” (Hampshire, 1999: 88)
Thus, searching for a universal identity from which to address the world is an important issue in the transformation of international order.
Universal Human rights and International Justice
As Vincent (1986) claimed, the idea of universal human rights has achieved considerable prominence in the rhetoric of international politics. The post-1945 humanitarian impulse led to the rise of Universal Declaration of Human Rights passed by the UN General Assembly in 1948. However, there is a contest between the old norm of sovereignty and universal principles.
The tensions between universal claims and realist concepts still remain as barriers to achieve the full recognition of human rights. Universal human rights principles are challenged by the degree of variations in social practices. Cultural relativists claim that each community has the right to live by its own customs, traditions and values (Evans, 1997: 142) Despite of these claims, human rights regimes and NGOs have visibly operated both globally and regionally towards the democratization of world order as a global civil society.
Moreover, an extensive body of international law is developed by the United Nations and in the other regional human rights regime. Unlike domestic laws, international law depends on reciprocity, collective action, and international norms. However, universal justice is difficult to enforce because there is no world police force and the need for reciprocity is difficult to establish. On the other hand, the quest for global governance has emerged and raised questions about whether international law is transforming into a supranational law. In fact, it is obvious that since the end of the Cold War, non-state human rights actors have become important agents in the international legal processes. As Resu-Smit argued ,
“Non-state human rights actors play a crucial role in shaping the normative environment in which states are moved to codify specific legal rules, in providing information to national governments that encourages the redefinition of state interests and in drafting international treaties and conventions” (Reus- Smit, 2005: 358)
Nevertheless, universal human rights and justice is increasingly concerned with global and the boundaries of realist principles are now being breached by the emergence of liberal international order.
Power and human rights
The debate on global rights is concerned with power at both national and international levels. At the national level, it is expressed in resistance or pro- democracy movements while it is expressed in criticisms of globalization as a form of Westernization and cultural imperialism at the international level.
From legal- institutionalist point of view, the power of global rights depends to a large extent on whether or not it supports the interests of powerful states and the creation of an independent international judiciary that has the power to enforce obedience to the law (Huysmans, 2004: 318). In this view, rights derive power from being translated into law that can be sanctioned by a sovereign authority. For instance, US President George Bush Senior justified the military intervention of Iraq in the 1990s in the name of international rule of law.
It is also argued that human rights will only be significant with a back up by a powerful state or coalition of states to enforce economic and military sanctions because there is no global human rights court for individual claims, a global police force and a prison system. So the power of global rights also resides with the relative economic and military power of the states trying to enforce.
Realism and the claims of universal human rights and justice
The claims of universal human rights and justice have challenged the traditional realist principles of international politics such as the principle of sovereignty, domestic jurisdiction, self-determination and non-intervention. As the states still remain as the highest authority in domestic affairs, universal rights and justice seem to threaten the sovereign actors of international society. For the realists who privilege national interests, the cosmopolitan universalism of international human rights regime represents a threat to national sovereignty.
For realists, international justice is nonsensical because they doubt the efficacy without the presence of a central authority to legislate, adjudicate and enforce international law. Realists are also hostile to the emerging liberal notion of 'peace through law' and international justice. George Kennan (1996) argued as
“Undoubtedly this represents an attempt to transpose the Anglo-Saxon concept of individual law into the international field and to make it applicable to governments” (Kennan, 1996: 102)
With increasing globalization and the liberal promotion of democracy and human rights, states have been in the tensions between the imperatives of national interests and universal rights. In most parts of the world, striking the balance between national interests and universal human rights led to serious policy questions. Bull (1977) claimed that sovereign states continued to aggregate to themselves the right to be the principle actors in world politics and worked collectively to resist the claims of suprastate or substate groups to wrest these rights and competencies from them (Bull, 1977:68)
Realists struggle to explain the growth of the immensely complex and dense international order in today world politics. They view the application of human rights law upon the states by United Nations manipulated by the powerful states as an inherent weakness on normative grounds. This is contrary to the human-centered logic of rights which regards human rights as value placing legitimate constraints upon the politics of national and interstate competition. Realists claim that the international law and human rights should be in the final analysis because morality is never universal.
Moreover, realists specify the dominant processes of interaction in international system as a balance of power and the structure as anarchic. Also, it is obvious that universal rights and justice cannot fundamentally transform the international system because only a world wide replacement of anarchy by hierarchy would change the character of the international system.
Liberalism and universal rights and justice
Since the language of medieval thinking, there is a strong liberal synthesis on rights which can be termed as the liberal position on rights that is made up of two components such as
Human beings possess rights to life, liberty, the secure possession of property, the exercise of freedom of speech, and so on which are inalienable and unconditional and
The primary function of government is to protect these rights, political institutions are to be judged on their performance of this function, and political obligation rests on their success in this- mean that political life is based on a kind of implicit or explicit contract between people and government. (Brown, 2005: 694)
This position is conceptually contested and liberalism before 1945 supported international humanitarian reform only within the limits of the norms and non-intervention. However, these norms have been less restrictive after the world wars.
In reaction to the catastrophic experiences of the period before the Second World War, human rights programmes have become a feature of post-1945 international politics. In the post-world period, the idea of universal rights and justice has been promoted through the creation of human rights regime. As Donnelly (1986) argued, the internationally recognized rules and norms regulating behavior in the aspects of international politics, including human rights, have been described as regimes.
With the fall of Berlin Wall, the idea of human rights has become the near universal accepted concept because liberal democracy and human rights are increasingly thought of as two sides of the same coin. Although the former human rights regimes have displayed weak implementational machinery in enforcing international justice, the idea of human rights kept at the centre of global politics and the impressive amount of international law on human rights generated by the UN has prompted a shift in the international normative order.
Moreover, a growing number of domestic and transnational NGOs devoted to securing justice and universal rights throughout the world suggested the growth of global civil society and the potential for a more democratic order. Also, the globalization of a complex network of communications has enabled these NGOs to exercise the power to embarrass, as Bergeson (1982) argued.
From legal perspectives, the new liberal , Anne-Marie Slaughter proposed a three-tiered conception of international law including the voluntary law of individuals and groups in transnational society, the law of transnational governmental institutions and the law of inter-state relationships by building on Moravcsik's three analytical assumptions of liberalism (Slaughter, 1995) She also argued that human rights law is placed at the core of international law as law that most directly affects individual-state relations is given priority within international public law. (Slaughter, 1995) However, her liberal claims seem to be blurred due to the enforcement reasons. In fact, the UN has still little authority and few resources to act against the law breakers.
Communitarian and Cosmopolitan perspectives on rights and justice
Communitarians claim that most people value their membership of a political community and unlikely to shift their loyalty from the nation-state to the human race. For them, the international arena is dominated by sovereign nation states that co-operate and conflict with one another. They deny a strong legal and political authority above the state and argue that rights and justice are culturally specific and cannot be applied across borders.
Moreover, communitarians maintained a position on human rights that they only have meaning in terms of the social fabric of the particular societies and cultures that proclaim them. So they reject the idea of human rights that are defined universally. (Prokhovnik, 2004: 251) Furthermore, communitarians believe that it is the responsibility of each state to uphold justice. Also, communitarians subscribe to a notion of needs-based distributive justice and stressed the social shaping of rights claims, the need for the communities and the role of statesin upholding a political order to protect these claims and needs.
In contrast, cosmopolitans argue that nations have little control over global markets and a limited ability to influence decisions taken by transnational organizations which influences currency values, employment prospects and so on. (Held, 1995) They promote the idea of global citizenship to widen a stronger sense of responsibility for the global environment and human rights issues. They regarded the establishment of International Criminal Court (ICC) as a 'cosmopolitan enforcement' and humanitarian intervention cases as 'the birth of a new era of humanitarian war'. For them, the international arena is a public sphere and some suggested the idea of the global order with a stronger set of institutions above the states.
For cosmopolitans, the idea of universal retributive justice follows logically from the notion of the universal human-rights carrying citizen. In the name of universal human rights, cosmopolitans pursue both distributive and retributive justice at an international levels in ways that compromise the independent sovereign rights of states to national self-determination. (Prokhovnik, 2004: 256-7) Despite of their claims, sovereignty and non-interference remains key principles of international order.
The role of universal rights and justice in the international order
Traditionally, the function of international order was just to protect the states as providers of social goods to their own citizens. However, it has been changed by the processes of globalization. As Clark (2005) argued,
“The international order is facing a hybrid situation in which states share a host of responsibilities with both IGOs and a multiplicity of non-governmental and transnational actors” (Clark, 2005: 740)
So the work of NGOs, IGOs, transnational actors with the use of information technology seems important and the significant role of universal rights and justice is unquestionable. Hoffman (1988) argued that liberal democracy and good human rights records are necessary if the states are to achieve and maintain global legitimacy. If it is so, abandonment of the traditional thinking of international relations might require to create democratic institutions and rights and justice as universal values.
Today, people in the world are aware of the their rights as universal human rights. The norms of putting human beings first and states second has also emerged with the growth of the social movements on women and environment issues. Liberal like Chandler even argued that
“UN protectorates established in Kosovo and Eastimo and the indictment of former Yogoslav President for war crimes indicate that international relations were no longer seen to be dominated by the need for inter-state consensus” (Chandler, 2002:8)
He even put forward that UN Charter was constructed to mean that human rights should take precedence over sovereignty at the UN World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna. For conventional defenders of human rights, the universal spread of respect for human rights is in the interests of all people around the world.
However, the present international order is still based upon the principle of sovereignty and expression of rights and justice as universal values within an a global order characterized as a system of states has been challenged by fundamentalists, feminist critics and intellectuals. Prokhovnik (2004) identified four specific sets of problems and a wider concern for discourse as follows.
'First, the rights discourse is not universal but is deeply informed by a Western Perspective. Second, feminist critiques dispute the universalism of rights and argue that they have a masculine basis. Third is the question of who can claim what rights against whom. The fourth problem relates to the way that individual rights may trump state sovereignty, and it challenges the human- centered feature of international rights discourse.'(Prokhovnik, 2004: 242)
Recently, there has been a wider concern about the fourth issue of state sovereignty after the Iraq intervention by US and its allies. The line between humanitarian intervention for human rights abuses and military intervention has become very blurred and it is still questionable whether human rights provide a universal principle on which to justify intervention that trumps state sovereignty or not.
Conclusion
In conclusion, it is obvious that the role of universal rights and justice in the transformation of international order is still unclear although the idea is an important step towards constructing a new world order that promotes the conditions for human rights and effective international justice. At the global level, states continue to focus on international law and human rights conferences as a way of demonstrating commitment to universal rights while maintaining national sovereignty and domestic jurisdiction as the highest values at the national level.
Khin Ma Ma Myo (Oct, 2008)
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