In The Last Utopia, with its subtitle Human Rights in History, Columbia University professor of history Samuel Moyn seeks to explain the rise of these rights in the modern world. He argues that though there now exists a mass of material about the genealogy of human rights, some of it seeing the origin of the concept as going back to the world of the ancient Israelites, the real birth of the idea as we now know it was with the inauguration of former US president Jimmy Carter on Jan. 20, 1977.
To some extent Moyn is indulging in a bit of academic opportunism, as he would no doubt be the first to admit. Plenty of books exist investigating, for instance, the rights of man as proclaimed by Tom Paine and subsequently so influential in both the American and French revolutions, and also the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as formulated by the fledgling UN in 1948. Not only did both of these differ significantly from what we understand by “human rights” today, they’ve also been very extensively studied, whereas the post-1977 era has received relatively little attention — until, that is, Moyn arrived on the scene.
The main difference today, he says, is that in earlier eras rights were perceived as things that states should, and sometimes did, recognize and even seek to guarantee. Now, however, they are understood as being above and reaching beyond concepts of nationality. Previously they were a part of politics, but now we perceive them as being supra-political. As the Russian writer and polemicist Alexander Solzhenitsyn long ago proclaimed, there are no longer any “internal affairs” of nations. Human rights are individual and moral, and people can claim them, at least in theory, over the heads of the states to which they technically belong.
Many states, of course, resent and resist this. China is the example that most readily springs to mind, with its frequent reiteration of the claim that the fate of this or that imprisoned dissident is “an internal matter” and consequently not a suitable subject for comment by foreigners. But the whole point of modern human rights, Moyn argues, is that they supersede the claims governments make on the allegiance of their citizens, and instead appeal to some higher, idealistic, essentially moral authority.
The reason Moyn calls a faith in human rights “the last utopia” is that he sees it as having surfaced following the collapse of purely political utopias. Communism no longer answers to the hopes of the oppressed, he argues, and post-colonial liberation has been achieved sometimes alongside, but all too frequently without access to, rights and freedoms of a major kind. Even democracy has been tarnished as an ideal by its adoption by neoconservatives as a mask for the renewed exploitation of conveniently placed populations, especially when communism is perceived as a temptation they might possibly succumb to.
Human rights, in other words, are a moral utopia that’s attractive after the political utopias have collapsed, an anti-political utopia after the political ones have deserted the stage.
This thesis dominates the beginning and end of the book. In between are chapters examining the history of rights of various kinds.
But it’s the modern era Moyn is really interested in. He examines the post-1977 era particularly closely, and sympathetically. Vaclav Havel, for instance, enjoys close scrutiny. As for Carter’s presidency, it may have experienced many setbacks, but Moyn sees it as a great advance on that of his predecessor Gerald Ford, who had refused Solzhenitsyn’s request for a White House meeting two years earlier. Amnesty International had opened an office in Washington, DC in 1976, and then received the Nobel Peace Prize in the fall of 1977. The following year Human Rights Watch (originally called Helsinki Watch) was founded; Karol Wojtyla, with his strong commitment to Polish freedoms, was elected pope; and Cardinal Henriquez of Chile (where former president Salvador Allende had been deposed and killed in a coup in 1973) declared 1978 to be a “year of human rights.”
After showing how people’s rights have lost their long connection with revolutions, Moyn goes on to point out that an opposition to violence is central to their orientation these days. The attempt to prevent genocide competes with opposition to and exposure of the use of torture (a concern pioneered in the modern era by Amnesty in 1972). “To date ... no NGOs organize revolutionary insurgency,” he tartly remarks.
And then there’s the issue of international law. Today it seems self-evident, Moyn observes, that among the major purposes of international law is the protection of individual human rights. Here the EU, with its European Court in Strasbourg, is seen as operating in a pioneering role.
When dealing with Asia, the book’s main focus is on the anti-colonial struggles of the decades following World War II. The European powers had unexpectedly tried to restore their controlling grip on their overseas possessions, and the struggle against them almost everywhere was nationalistic in character, with the rights of individuals (except their right to be citizens of as yet nonexistent countries) not much in evidence.
Moyn is a highly intelligent, markedly astute commentator. No possible viewpoint eludes his vigilance. He gives the impression of being suave in nature and comprehensive in awareness. This book, as a result, is a bravura performance by a leading light in an apparently crowded and busy field. It isn’t in any way a populist call to arms, but rather an urbane probing of trends and the implications of trends. It doesn’t always make for easy reading, but one thing you are constantly aware of is that you are in exceptionally capable, and even protective, hands. Rabble-rousers are nowhere in sight, and you feel Moyn wouldn’t notice them even in the unlikely event of any of them making an appearance.
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