http://english.aljazeera.net/focus/humanrightsun/2008/12/2008121014247782135.html
Thursday, December 11, 2008
11:58 Mecca time, 08:58 GMT
A convergence of ideas
By Ranjit Bhaskar
New norms driven by individualism, republicanism and industrial
capital led to the emergence of the concept[GALLO/GETTY]
The concept of human rights is one of the most powerful espoused in the
20th century.
Ever since the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by
the United Nations on December 10, 1948, the legitimacy and popularity of human
rights discourse has grown consistently.
It has also opened up areas of ambiguity.
One such is the origins of human rights. Are human rights essentially a
"modern" Western construct? Did human rights exist in non-Western societies?
Was it an intrinsic part of ancient religions?
While the bulk of early writings on the origins, including contributions
from the South, traced the concept back to late medieval Europe, there have
been attempts to see the beginnings elsewhere.
However, the debate on the origins has its pitfalls.
Western traditions?
The definition of rights, and in particular human rights, tends to be
less rigorous. A majority of authors either consider the idea to be either
"self evident" or tend to define it loosely in historical and normative terms.
For Western authors, the universal nature of human rights draws
exclusively from Western traditions of thought.
Similarly, literature on non-Western traditions seems to confuse human
rights with humane governance practices or humanitarian considerations in
political governance.
To clear this fog, human rights should be seen as a set of values that
intend to provide a perception of a human being and a moral and legal basis to
regulate relations between human beings.
Seen from this perspective, human rights are merely a new basis for
regulating human conduct and relations as all societies have had some form of
socio-cultural-political regulation.
In other words, perceptions of duties and privileges did exist in all
human societies. The question is whether we can identify humane practices
present in those ancient and medieval times as human rights practices.
Philosophical radical individualism
A rigorous definition has to be linked to the emergence of a new
perception of a human being based on philosophical radical individualism along
with a political order shaped by the spirit of republicanism and an economic
order based on industrial capitalism.
While these processes emerged with significant force in 17th century
Europe, a host of developments preceded them. It is for this reason that the
origins of modern human rights are generally traced back to 13th century Europe.
Here the focus is not so much on the humane character of existing norms,
but the context and the emergence of new norms driven by individualism,
republicanism and industrial capital.
The beginning of this journey can be seen in two historical contexts.
The first is European history from the 13th century to 19th century and
the second is the events in the colonised South from the 18th century to the
mid-twentieth century.
Within the first period, there were two sets of developments.
The first set could be put together from a series of documents beginning
with the Magna Carta (1215), the Petition of Right (1628), the English Bill of
Rights (1688) and followed by the republican declarations of the 18th century
in the US (1776) and France (1789).
The second set could also be seen as a series of documents like the
Declaration of Rights of Women (1791), the Chartist declaration - the People's
Petition (1838), the Negro Declaration (1876) and the Declaration of Rights for
Women (1876).
The second historical context was marked by numerous movements against
Western colonialism. It was ironical that colonial domination was often
justified by the same people who fought for the new social and political orders
in Europe.
Not surprisingly, the bulk of literature on the history of human rights
has very little reference to colonialism and human rights violations.
However, the aspirations and demands of the struggle against colonialism
both within the West as well as in the colonies are important sources of
influence in giving meaning and content to contemporary human rights.
Power play
The paradoxes in the development of human rights do not stem from any
kind of rejection of the concept. Rather, a theme that is common among all of
them is "demand for rights" by and for the excluded groups.
An exception to this would be the struggles of native people,
particularly in North America during the 18th and 19th centuries. These were
not based on the demand for "inclusion" into the framework of modern
development and human rights. On the contrary, it was an explicit resistance to
such plans by the US government.
Yet again, the universal principles of human rights were a silent witness
to the annihilation of native Americans in the name of advancing freedom and
civilisation.
These absurdities highlight two issues.
First, however inclusive a concept might be, and however democratic may
be its perceived or theoretical meaning, its actual realisation is and is
always likely to be limited by the historical context.
Certain kinds of exclusions will always be not recognised as exclusions
or underplayed for reasons of the interests of dominant groups.
Coexistence of "universal" claims of rights with blatant practices of
gender discrimination across the social settings; colonialism; slavery; and
systematic discrimination based on caste, race and religion represent this
quandary.
While human rights are norms with claims of universal applicability,
their eventual meaning and content is determined by the context of power
relations.
Modernism challenged
The second issue that jumps out of these paradoxes is a duality in human
rights: that human rights is simultaneously a means of entrenching Western
hegemony and equally a potential source of inspiration to the downtrodden in
their struggles for empowerment.
Human rights thus seem to be significant on two counts.
First, it places normative commitment over and above real politick. And
it provides a framework to evaluate unprincipled politics and economic
development. Second, it has evolved as a powerful tool to point out the
uncivilised character of modernisation.
It is noteworthy that the last couple of decades has seen a growing
challenge to modernism within both academia and social movements. The
presumption that its spread is both inevitable and desirable is being
challenged. Social relations based on and guided by contractual relations as
against status-based systems are also being questioned.
These challenges do not emanate from the so-called cultural relativist
arguments. Rather, they emerge from the debates on the rights of indigenous and
tribal peoples.
What is emerging is a fascinating convergence between the debates on
human rights and those on environment and development.
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