Micheline Ishay - The History of Human Rights: From Ancient Times to the Globalization Era

W HEN THIS BOOK WAS submitted to my publisher in 2002, it characterized the human rights community as fragmented into a variety of single-issue agendas, and attributed that fragmentation to factors associated with the end of the cold war and accelerating globalization. Even then, one could discern a growing fissure over a set of interrelated policy debates on important global issues. One of those debates was over globalization itself, embraced by one side as opening new space for human rights progress, and denounced by the other as a source of deepening global poverty.

Yet if this first postcold war human rights debate could be seen retrospectively as a sign of new fault lines, no single event or issue had sufficient force to split the human rights community into two starkly opposed worldviews. That galvanizing issue, sparked by the events of September 11, would be what U.S. leaders have described as the global war on terror. During the five years following the publication of this book in the United States, a second debate now crystallized over whether the United States, the major maestro of globalization, should be seen as the global guardian of human rights or as an empire bent on economic, military, and ideological domination.

As I write this preface in August 2007, it appears that we may be at the dawn of a third debate, born out of the ashes of the American fiasco in Iraq and the resultant Democratic Party takeover of the United States Congress in the November 2006 elections. These events combined to place neo-conservative defenders of unrestrained globalization and democratization, enforceable by U.S. military power, on the defensive. This time, while the global progressive human rights community must continue to confront its old neo-liberal and neo-conservative adversaries, advocates of universal human rights are also taking up the challenge posed by religious (or cultural) fundamentalism in its Islamist and other religious extremist forms.

This foreword offers a perspective on these interacting layers of human rights debatebetween globalists and anti-globalists, unilateralists and multilateralists, and between market ideology and religious fundamentalismsuggesting in all three cases that human rights progress will require moving beyond Manichean divisions. I will begin by describing the first two phases of the postcold war debate over globalization and human rights, then move on to characterize the new debate, offering my view of the basic stance that the human rights community needs to take.

This debate is the one most familiar to those interested in the human rights implications of economic globalization, and much has been discussed in my first edition. For one side, the side with the ear of political elites throughout the developed world, the collapse of the Soviet Union opened the door to the global triumph of a free market economy.

This position has been advanced by mainstream U.S. politicians of both major political parties, who have supported free trade agreements (e.g., NAFTA and the WTO) without insisting on serious labor standards, professing along with leaders like Bill Clinton and Tony Blair that expanded trade will ineluctably help universalize liberal notions of human rights. Those who hold this position are generally confident that economic liberalization, once it takes root in otherwise protectionist or barren economies, will promote, at least in the long run, affluent societies and stable democratic institutions.

By contrast, for the anti-globalist activists of the world social forums, globalization has shaped a new imperial economic regime, one in which the IMF, WTO, the G8, and other international institutions continue to reflect the self-interest of the wealthiest states. For anti-globalists, neo-liberalism has produced a sinister reality: one in which labor rights have been undercut and welfare policies scrapped; one in which bait-and-switch immigration policies shaped by elites in the privileged world have intensified the hardships suffered by refugees and immigrants fleeing from poverty, repression, or war; one in which the poorest countries and peoples are getting poorer in both relative and absolute terms; and one in which environmental degradation driven by pollution and deforestation has endangered the livelihood of indigenous peoples.

That leftist critique of globalization has a right-wing variant in developed states, where the primary concern is with the loss of businesses and jobs to low-wage regions. The result has sometimes been strange coalitions between left and right, as when the progressive American activist Ralph Nader joined the right-wing, nationalist leader Pat Buchanan in opposing NAFTA and the WTO. Unlike mainstream globalists, who rationalize their human rights strategies in terms of political and security rights, anti-globalists tend to highlight economic, social, and environmental rights. There is, of course, considerable middle ground between the extremes on both sides of this debate, and it is worth considering the outlines of a position around which most human rights supporters might unite.

Can one carve a position between globalists and anti-globalists?

Economic development programs, argued Nobel Prizewinning Indian economist Amartya Sen, should not primarily require the blood, sweat, and tears of the poor but should design policies that link economic growth to respect for human freedom and other central tenets of human rights. Put another way, social, political, civil, and security rights are constitutive parts of development. Sens insistence that development policies must advance the full spectrum of universal human rights provides criteria for criticizing both sides in the debate between free-traders and anti-globalists. In a sense, he reminds us of the integrated projects of postWorld War II reconstruction and the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights.