Muriel Campbell's Web-based resources

© Muriel Campbell 2003

CRITICAL READING AND WRITING

Ignatieff, Michael. 2001. HUMAN RIGHTS AS POLITICS AND IDOLATRY. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

PART ONE

What is the content of the article?

The author is reviewing the progress of the international Human Rights Movement since the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948. He is looking at it from two perspectives. The first perspective is Human Rights as Politics:

to summarize we are intervening in the name of human rights as never before, but our interventions are sometimes making matters worse. Our interventions, instead of reinforcing human rights, may be consuming their legitimacy as a universal basis for foreign policy. (Ignatieff 2001: 47)

The second perspective is Human Rights as Idolatry:

we need to stop thinking of human rights as trumps and begin thinking of them as a language that creates the basis for deliberation. (Ignatieff 2001: 95)

What is his conclusion?

…what should our goals as believers in human rights be? Here my slogan would be the title of the justly famous essay by my old teacher, Judith Shklar, “Putting Cruelty First.”¹ We may not be able to create democracies or constitutions. Liberal freedom may be some way off. But we could do more than we do to stop unmerited suffering and gross physical cruelty that I take to be the elemental priority of all human rights activism: to stop torture, beatings, killings, rape, and assault and to improve, as best we can, the security of ordinary people. My minimalism is not strategic at all. It is the most we can hope for. (Ignatieff 2001: 173)

In his book he covers a wide array of Human rights topics; here is a summary of major points he has made in Human rights as Politics:

In the area of Human Rights and Moral Progress:

…our species is one, and each of the individuals who compose it is entitled to equal moral consideration. Human rights is the language that systematically embodies this intuition, and to the degree that this intuition gains influence over the conduct of individuals and states, we say that we are making moral progress. …We think of the moral diffusion of this idea to be progress for two reasons: because if we live by it, we treat more human beings as we would wish to be treated ourselves, and in doing help to reduce the amount of cruelty and unmerited suffering in the world. (Ignatieff 2001: 3-4)

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights represented

…a return intended to restore agency, to give individuals the civic courage to stand up when the state ordered them to do wrong. (Ignatieff 2001: 5)

On the Juridical, Advocacy and Enforcement Revolutions he writes:

The juridical revolution included the UN Charter of 1945, outlawing aggressive war between states; the Genocide Convention of 1948, protecting religious, racial, and ethnic groups against extermination; the revision of the Geneva Conventions of 1949, strengthening noncombatant immunity; and finally the international convention on asylum of 1951 to protect the rights of refugees. (Ignatieff 2001: 5)

Human rights have gone global by going local, imbedding itself in the soil of cultures and worldviews independent of the West, in order to sustain ordinary people’s struggles against unjust states and oppressive social practices. (Ignatieff 2001: 7)

The juridical, advocacy, and enforcement revolutions have dramatically raised expectations, and it is unsurprising that the reality of human rights practice should disappoint. (Ignatieff 2001: 17)

On American Imperialism:

Since Eleanor Roosevelt chaired the committee that produced the Universal Declaration, America has promoted human rights norms around the world, while also resisting the idea that these norms apply to American citizens and American institutions. (Ignatieff 2001: 13)

…international human rights objections are seen as both irrelevant and intrusive. (Ignatieff 2001: 14)

On Human Rights and Nationalism:

International Human Rights has furthered the growth of Nationalism, since human rights covenants have encouraged, if not endorsed the core claim of nationalist movements to collective self-determination. (Ignatieff 2001: 13-14)

The classic case of this preference for national rights rather than human rights is, of course, the state of Israel. The Universal Declaration was, in large measure, a response to the torment of the Jewish people. Yet the survivors’ overwhelming desire to create a Jewish state, capable of defending Jews everywhere against oppression, reveals that they trusted more to the creation of a state of their own than to the uncertain benefits of universal human rights protection within other people’s national states. (Ignatieff 2001: 15)

So this is where we are after fifty years of a human rights revolution. Most human beings depend for their rights on the states they live in; those who do not have states of their own aspire to one and in some cases are fighting for one. (Ignatieff 2001: 17)

On Establishing The Limits of Human Rights:

What precise balance is to be struck between international human rights and state sovereignty? When is intervention justified to reverse human rights abuses in another state? (Ignatieff 2001: 17)

The larger illusion I want to criticize is that human rights is above politics, a set of moral trump cards whose function is to bring political disputes to closure and conclusion. (Ignatieff 2001: 21)

Human rights is nothing more than politics, one that must reconcile moral ends to concrete situations and must be prepared to make painful compromises not only between means and ends, but between ends themselves. (Ignatieff 2001: 17-18)

Given the conflictual character of rights, and given the fact that many forms of oppression will not answer to argument and deliberation, there are occasions, which must be strictly defined, when human rights as politics becomes a fighting creed, a call to arms. (Ignatieff 2001: 22)

On Human Rights and Self Determination:

States in the age of human rights have to reconcile human rights observance with containing a dissident or oppressed opposition or an ethnic minority seeking self-determination. (Ignatieff 2001: 23)

…the problem in Western human rights policy is that by promoting ethnic self-determination, we may actually endanger the stability that is a precondition for protecting human rights….The painful truth is that national self-determination is not always favorable to individual human rights, and democracy and human rights do not necessarily advance hand in hand. (Ignatieff 2001: 29-30)

On Human Rights, Democracy and Constitutionalism:

In order to reconcile the democracy and human rights, Western policy will have to put more emphasis not on democracy alone but on constitutionalism, the entrenchment of the balance of powers, judicial review of executive decisions and enforceable human rights guarantees.30 Democracy without constitutionalism is simply ethnic majority tyranny. (Ignatieff 2001: 30)

On Human Rights and Military Intervention:

When all order in a state has disintegrated and its people have been delivered up to a war of all against all, or where a state is engaging in gross, repeated, and systemic violence against its own citizens, the only effective way to protect human rights is direct intervention, ranging from sanctions to the use of military force. (Ignatieff 2001: 37)

We are intervening not to take over territory but to bring peace and stability and then get out; our mandate is to restore self-determination, not to extinguish it. (Ignatieff 2001: 39)

Human rights may be universal, but support for coercive enforcement of their norms will never be universal. Because interventions will lack full legitimacy, they will have to be limited and partial, and as a result, they will be only partially successful. (Ignatieff 2001: 43)

On means and ends:

Any military or humanitarian intervention amounts to moral promise to persons in need. If we make promises of this sort, we owe it to ourselves and those we intend to help to devise the military strategy, rules of engagement, and chain of command necessary to make good our promises. Our failure to do so – in Rwanda and in Bosnia – has undermined the credibility of human rights values in zones of danger around the world. Innocent civilians in danger now have no good reason to trust any promise of protection made by UN peacekeepers. The impact on human rights norms has been catastrophic. (Ignatieff 2001: 44-45)

On intervention as a reward for violence:

…we are intervening in the name of human rights as never before, but our interventions are sometimes making matters worse. Our interventions, instead of reinforcing human rights, may be consuming their legitimacy as a universalistic basis for human policy. (Ignatieff 2001: 47)

Non-Western cultures look at the partial and inconsistent way that we enforce and apply human rights principles and conclude that there is something wrong with the principles themselves….It has lead the cultures of the non-Western world to view human rights as nothing more than a justification for Western moral imperialism. (Ignatieff 2001: 48)

On the topic of Human Rights as Idolatry:

Human rights has become the major article of faith of a secular culture that fears it believes in nothing else. …Human rights is misunderstood, I shall argue, if it is seen as a “secular religion”. It is not a creed; it is not a metaphysics. To make it so is to turn into a species of idolatry: humanism worshiping itself. Elevating the moral and metaphysical claims made on behalf of human rights may be intended to increase its universal appeal. In fact, it has the opposite effect, raising doubts among religious and non-Western groups who do not happen to be in need of Western secular creeds. (Ignatieff 2001: 53)

Human rights is an account of what is right, not an account of what is good. (Ignatieff 2001: 55)

…people from different cultures may continue to disagree about what is good, but nevertheless agree about what is insufferably, inarguably wrong. (Ignatieff 2001: 56)

There are three distinct sources of cultural challenge to the universality of human rights. Two come from outside the West; one from the resurgent Islam, the second from East Asia; and the third, from the West itself. Each of these is independent of the others; but taken together; they have raised substantial questions about the cross-cultural validity and hence legitimacy of human rights norms. (Ignatieff 2001: 58)

On the Islamic Challenge:

The authors of the draft declaration had, for the most part, taken into consideration only the standards recognized by western civilization and had ignored more ancient civilization which were past the experimental stage, and the institutions which, for example, marriage, had proved the wisdom through the centuries. It was not for the Committee to proclaim the superiority of one civilization over all other[s] or to establish uniform standards for all countries in the world .4 (Ignatieff 2001: 59)

On Asian values:

While the Islamic challenge to human rights can be explained in part by the failure of Islamic societies to benefit from the global economy, the Asian challenge is a consequence of the region’s staggering success. (Ignatieff 2001:62)

An “Asian model” puts community and family ahead of individual rights and order ahead of democracy and individual freedom. (Ignatieff 2001: 63)

On Human Rights and individualism:

whereas disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind. (Ignatieff 2001: 65)

Group rights doctrines exist to safeguard the collective rights – for example, to language – that make individual agency meaningful and valuable. But individual and group interests inevitably conflict. Human rights exist to adjudicate these conflicts, to define their irreducible minimum beyond which group and collective claims must not go in constraining the lives of individuals. …To seek human rights protections is not to change your civilization; it is merely to avail yourself of the protections of “negative liberty”. (Ignatieff 2001: 69)

Human rights intervention is warranted not because traditional, patriarchal, or religious authority is primitive, backward or uncivilized by our standards, but by the standards of whose whom it oppresses. The warrant for intervention derives from their demands, not from ours. (Ignatieff 2001: 77)

On the spiritual crisis:

To point out the European origin of rights is not to endorse Western Cultural imperialism. Historical priority does not confer moral superiority. As Jack Donnelly points out, the Declaration’s historical function was not to universalize European values but actually to put certain of them – racism, sexism, and anti-Semitism, for example – under external ban. (Ignatieff 2001: 91-92)

On the West against itself:

In the moral dispute between the “West” and the “Rest” both sides make the mistake of assuming that the other speaks with one voice. (Ignatieff 2001: 92)

…recognition that we live in a plural world of cultures that have a right to equal consideration in the argument about what we can and cannot, should and should not, do to human beings. Indeed, this may be the central historical importance of human progress: it has abolished the hierarchy of civilizations and cultures. …Rights language says: all human beings belong at the table, in the essential conversation about how we should treat each other. (Ignatieff 2001: 94)

He summarizes by saying:

We need to stop thinking of human rights as trumps and begin thinking of them as a language that creates the basis for deliberation. In the argument, the ground we share may actually be quite limited: not much more than the basic intuition that what pain and humiliation for you is bound to be pain and humiliation for me. But this is already something. In such a future, shared among equals, rights are not the universal credo of a global society, not a secular religion, but something much more limited and yet just as valuable: the shared vocabulary from which our arguments can begin, and the bare minimum from which differing ideas of human flourishing can take root. (Ignatieff 2001: 95)

In response to commentators:

…what should our goals as believers in human rights be? …But we can do more than we do to stop unmerited suffering and gross physical cruelty. That I take to be the elemental priority of all human rights activism: to stop torture, beatings, killings, rape and assault and to improve, as best we can, the security of ordinary people. The minimalism is not strategic at all. It is the most that we can hope for. (Ignatieff 2001: 173)

PART TWO

MY RESPONSE AND REACTION:

When I first thought about doing my review I thought I would just do a brief summary of the book; quite similar to a book review in school. However, when I started to read the book, I noticed that I had to keep reading. What I found was a wealth of information on the progress of the Human rights movement over the past fifty years. Prior to this, whenever I would hear of human rights abuses in far away places or even just down the street, I would wonder why are the perpetrators doing that and why are the people putting up with it? My understanding of human rights, we could say, has gone a lot more global after reading this book. I found that it shed so much light on the subject that I had to take time to absorb. I put the book away as well as all the notes that I had taken; I then paid more attention to the news stories/articles that dealt with human rights abuses. I reflected on historic events on human rights based on the information that I had read. We all think we know how to get along with our neighbours in our own backyard: we know which people we can approach without hesitation and which we have to be more cautious about. We know the approaches are different but we know that we can still approach our neighbours. If we know that about our own societies in our own little world, why do we have such problem applying that approach to the global community? It is because of the differences in history, in culture, in languages and in attitudes that we have to be cautious. We have to remember that there are always two sides to the story and that we should be as open as we can to hearing the full story. All the differences in the societies around the world seems to be the reasons why the human rights movement may seem like it is going at a turtle’s pace. We will make mistakes in our approaches, we will make mistakes in our timing, we may not even look in our own back yard before taking an action somewhere else; but we have to try to make the world a better place for all of the citizens.

I agree that the language of human rights is something that we have to continue to work on; when we go to the table to discuss human rights, we have to make sure that we are talking about the same thing. I was not surprised to hear references about the “West” and the “Rest”: being an Aboriginal person who has faced and felt unequal treatment by the dominant society, I could see how people could feel that way. We all want to help people but are they all in need of help and what are our tactics? I am inspired to know that people are trying to make an effort to make further progress in the area of human rights. The “purple” areas, the areas that keep me from having a deeper understanding of various views on human rights stem from my lack of knowledge on other religions, societies and histories. I take it upon myself to learn more about my neighbours all over the world because in this day and age of mobility and electronic access you never know where your next door neighbour has moved from. In my own life experience and from the stories that my fellow human beings have shared with me, I can vouch for the fact that progress in the area of human rights seems to have been s – l – o – w. It was worse for our ancestors but it is improving for us and we have to make sure that life will be easier for our children and indeed all future generations.

PART THREE

Michael Ignatieff stated:

the elemental priority of all human rights activism: to stop torture, beatings, killings, rape, and assault to improve, as best we can, the security of ordinary people. My minimalism is not strategic at all. It is the best we can hope for. (Ignatieff 2001: 173)

I think this is what we hope to attain for everyone in our own home, family, community, territory and country. We just have to remember that there is more to the world than our own home, family, community, territory and country. We have to continue on working on the language of human rights and make sure that we practice what we preach. Our actions do speak louder than words and this we sometimes overlook. We also have to remember that events may take place thousands of miles away, but we have to remember that we are all human beings. The colour of our skin, our language, our culture, our history and even our attitudes may be different, but the blood in our veins still runs red. With each story of human rights injustices that we hear we have to look at it as happening to a fellow human being and not look at anything else. In order to reach the bare minimum of human rights we have to have this bare minimum of respect for all human beings. We are all in this world together, let us learn to work together and make it a better place for all. With deeper understanding of cultures we will have a deeper appreciation for what makes societies work; and perhaps work at improving life for all with more of a passion and a dedication.

The crisis of human rights relates first of all to our failure to be consistent – to apply human rights criteria to the strong as well as the weak; second, to our related failure to reconcile individual human rights with our commitment to self determination and state sovereignty; and third, to our inability, once we intervene on human rights grounds, to successfully create the legitimate institutions that alone are the best guarantee of human rights protection. (Ignatieff 2001: 47)

In the aboriginal community we are trying to work for what we consider to be basic human rights, we are working towards self-determination. I think all that everyone wants is the freedom to practice their own customs, their own religion and live life the way that makes them feel good about themselves. When we feel good in our own mind we are more open to sharing what is good with everyone else. My area of inquiry is with cultural rights, another one of those rights that I feel we need to protect. We should be free to have government, leadership and institutions that reflect our traditions; and more importantly we, our government, our leadership and our institutions should not be inferior but be on equal [common] ground with everyone else. In conclusion, I would recommend this book to anyone that is learning about human rights. How can we learn about human rights if we do not know where we started from, the road that we have taken, the progress and the mistakes that we have made? We all need to have a global perspective to help us have a deeper understanding on the subject of human rights. With the deeper understanding I am sure will come wisdom, with wisdom will come the correct human rights language that will help us attain our goals of human rights for all.

Ignatieff, Michael. 2001. HUMAN RIGHTS AS POLITICS AND IDOLATRY. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

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