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NY Times Op-Ed, April 24, 2018
How the Human Rights Movement Failed
By Samuel Moyn
The human rights movement, like the world it monitors, is in crisis:
After decades of gains, nearly every country seems to be backsliding.
Viktor Orban in Hungary, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines and other
populist leaders routinely express contempt for human rights and their
defenders.
But from the biggest watchdogs to monitors at the United Nations, the
human rights movement, like the rest of the global elite, seems to be
drawing the wrong lessons from its difficulties.
Advocates have doubled down on old strategies without reckoning that
their attempts to name and shame can do more to stoke anger than to
change behavior. Above all, they have ignored how the grievances of
newly mobilized majorities have to be addressed if there is to be an
opening for better treatment of vulnerable minorities.
“The central lesson of the past year is that despite considerable
headwinds, a vigorous defense of human rights can succeed,” Kenneth
Roth, the longtime head of Human Rights Watch, contended recently,
adding that many still “can be convinced to reject the scapegoating of
unpopular minorities and leaders’ efforts to undermine basic democratic
checks and balances.”
That seems unlikely. Of course, activism can awaken people to the
problems with supporting abusive governments. But if lectures about
moral obligations made an enormous difference, the world would already
look much better. Instead, those who care about human rights need to
take seriously the forces that lead so many people to vote in
majoritarian strongmen in the first place.
The truth is that the growth of international human rights politics has
accompanied the very economic phenomena that have led to the rise of
radical populism and nationalism today. In short, human rights activism
made itself at home in a plutocratic world.
It didn’t have to be this way. The Universal Declaration of Human
Rights, which was promulgated in 1948 amid the consolidation of welfare
states in Europe and North America and which formed the basis of the
human rights agenda, was supposed to enshrine social protections. But in
the 1970s, when activists in the United States and Western Europe began
to take up the cause of “human rights” for the victims of brutal
regimes, they forgot about that social citizenship. The signature group
of that era, Amnesty International, focused narrowly on imprisonment and
torture; similarly, Human Rights Watch rejected advocating economic and
social rights.
This approach began to change after the Cold War, especially when it
came to nongovernmental advocacy in post-colonial countries. But even
then, human rights advocacy did not reassert the goal of economic
fairness. Even as more activists have come to understand that political
and civil freedom will struggle to survive in an unfair economic system,
the focus has often been on subsistence.
In the 1990s, after the Cold War ended, both human rights and pro-market
policies reached the apogee of their prestige. In Eastern Europe, human
rights activists concentrated on ousting old elites and supporting basic
liberal principles even as state assets were sold off to oligarchs and
inequality exploded. In Latin America, the movement focused on putting
former despots behind bars. But a neoliberal program that had arisen
under the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet swept the continent along
with democracy, while the human rights movement did not learn enough of
a new interest in distributional fairness to keep inequality from spiking.
Now the world is reaping what the period of swelling inequality that
began in the 1970s through the 1990s sowed.
There have been recent signs of reorientation. The Ford Foundation,
which in the 1970s provided much of the funding that made global human
rights activism possible, announced in 2015 that it would start focusing
on economic fairness. George Soros, a generous funder of human rights
causes, has recently observed that inequality matters, too.
Some have insisted that the movement can simply take on, without much
alteration of its traditional idealism and tactics, the challenge of
inequality that it ignored for so long. This is doubtful.
At the most, activists distance themselves from free-market
fundamentalism only by making clear how much inequality undermines human
rights themselves. Minimum entitlements, like decent housing and health
care, require someone to pay. Without insisting on more than donations
from the rich, the traditional companionship of human rights movements
with neoliberal policies will give rise to the allegation that the two
are in cahoots. No one wants the human rights movement to be remembered
as a casualty of a justifiable revolt against the rich.
If the movement itself should not squander the chance to reconsider how
it is going to survive, the same is even truer of its audience —
policymakers, politicians and the rest of the elite. They must keep
human rights in perspective: Human rights depend on majority support if
they are to be taken seriously. A failure to back a broader politics of
fairness is doubly risky. It leaves rights groups standing for
principles they cannot see through. And it leaves majorities open to
persuasion by troubling forces.
It has been tempting for four decades to believe that human rights are
the primary bulwark against barbarism. But an even more ambitious agenda
is to provide the necessary alternative to the rising evils of our time.
Samuel Moyn is a professor of law and history at Yale and the author,
most recently, of “Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World.”
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