Posit(ion)ing human rights in the current global conjuncture

Public Culture

Volumn 9, Issue 2, 1997, Pages 233-266

  Cheah, Pheng ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 0031502555     PISSN: 08992363     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/08992363-9-2-233     Document Type: Review

References (66)

1. See, for instance, Karl Marx, "On the Jewish Question" in Early Writings, Pelican Marx Library (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975), 211-241, For an incisive discussion of Marx's critique of rights, see Claude Lefort, "Politics and Human Rights" in The Political Forms of Modern Society-Bureaucracy, Democracy, Totalitarianism (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1986), 239-272.
2. See, for instance, Karl Marx, "On the Jewish Question" in Early Writings, Pelican Marx Library (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975), 211-241, For an incisive discussion of Marx's critique of rights, see Claude Lefort, "Politics and Human Rights" in The Political Forms of Modern Society-Bureaucracy, Democracy, Totalitarianism (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1986), 239-272.
3. Adamantia Pollis and Peter Schwab, "Human Rights: A Western Construct with Limited Applicability," in Pollis and Schwab, eds., Human Rights: Cultural and Ideological Perspectives (New York: Praeger, 1979), 1-18, p. 17.
4. Marnia Lazreg, "Human Rights, State and Ideology: An Historical Perspective," in Pollis and Schwab, eds., Human Rights, 32-43, p. 34.
5. Statement by Wong Kan Seng, Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Singapore, Vienna, 16 June, 1993, reprinted in James Tang, ed., Human Rights and International Relations in the Asia Pacific (London: Pinter, 1995), 242-7, p. 243.
6. First-generation rights refer primarily to civil and political rights. They are basically negative rights which protect the individual from arbitrary state action and are associated with Western liberal democracies. They are said to have their roots in the French and American revolutions and are articulated in the Universal Declaration and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Second-generation rights refer to social, economic and cultural rights. They are positive rights associated with socialist states and are said to have their roots in the socialist revolutions of the early twentieth century. They are specifically articulated in the International Covenant on Social, Economic and Cultural Rights. The Covenants were only ratified by the General Assembly in 1966. Thirdgeneration rights are summed up under the right to development and are rooted in the anticolonialist revolutions which begin after World War II and culminate in independence in the 1960s. The right to development is implicit in Articles 55 and 56 of the UN Charter and Articles 22 and 27 of the Universal Declaration. In June 1979, the UN Commission on Human Rights resolved that the right to development is a human right. Most developed countries (Denmark, Finland, Germany, Iceland, Israel, Japan, Sweden and the U.K.) abstained from voting on the Declaration on the Right to Development. Canada and Australia adopted a compromised position and voted in favour. The U.S. voted against it. For an overview of the politics involved in the ratification of these rights and their pertinence in a Cold War and post-Cold War scenario, see Brenda Cossman, "Reform, Revolution or Retrenchment? International Human Rights in the Post Cold War Era," Harvard International Law Journal 32, 2 (Spring 1991): 339-352. For a discussion on how the right to development relates to the other two types of rights; whether the right to development is an instrumental or third generation right or a resultant/consequential right and whether it refers to the development of the individual or the state, see R.N. Treverdi, "Overview of International Human Rights Law in Theory and Practice: Its Linkages to Access to Justice at the Domestic Level," in Harry Scoble and Laurie Weisberg, eds., Access to Justice-ne Struggle for Human Rights in South-East Asia (London: Zed Books, 1985), 22-30, pp. 27-30.
7. First-generation rights refer primarily to civil and political rights. They are basically negative rights which protect the individual from arbitrary state action and are associated with Western liberal democracies. They are said to have their roots in the French and American revolutions and are articulated in the Universal Declaration and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Second-generation rights refer to social, economic and cultural rights. They are positive rights associated with socialist states and are said to have their roots in the socialist revolutions of the early twentieth century. They are specifically articulated in the International Covenant on Social, Economic and Cultural Rights. The Covenants were only ratified by the General Assembly in 1966. Thirdgeneration rights are summed up under the right to development and are rooted in the anticolonialist revolutions which begin after World War II and culminate in independence in the 1960s. The right to development is implicit in Articles 55 and 56 of the UN Charter and Articles 22 and 27 of the Universal Declaration. In June 1979, the UN Commission on Human Rights resolved that the right to development is a human right. Most developed countries (Denmark, Finland, Germany, Iceland, Israel, Japan, Sweden and the U.K.) abstained from voting on the Declaration on the Right to Development. Canada and Australia adopted a compromised position and voted in favour. The U.S. voted against it. For an overview of the politics involved in the ratification of these rights and their pertinence in a Cold War and post-Cold War scenario, see Brenda Cossman, "Reform, Revolution or Retrenchment? International Human Rights in the Post Cold War Era," Harvard International Law Journal 32, 2 (Spring 1991): 339-352. For a discussion on how the right to development relates to the other two types of rights; whether the right to development is an instrumental or third generation right or a resultant/consequential right and whether it refers to the development of the individual or the state, see R.N. Treverdi, "Overview of International Human Rights Law in Theory and Practice: Its Linkages to Access to Justice at the Domestic Level," in Harry Scoble and Laurie Weisberg, eds., Access to Justice-ne Struggle for Human Rights in South-East Asia (London: Zed Books, 1985), 22-30, pp. 27-30.
8. On contemporary Asian capitalism, see Ruth McVey, ed., Southeast Asian Capitalists (Ithaca: Cornell Southeast Asia Program, 1992) and more recently, "Asia's Competing Capitalisms," Economist, June 24, 1995, pp. 16-17.
9. On contemporary Asian capitalism, see Ruth McVey, ed., Southeast Asian Capitalists (Ithaca: Cornell Southeast Asia Program, 1992) and more recently, "Asia's Competing Capitalisms," Economist, June 24, 1995, pp. 16-17.
10. See Edward Gargan, "An Asian Giant Spreads Roots," New York Times, November 14, 1995, D1, D4, and "Asia Guide Calls Local Partners Key to Success," New York Times, November 14, 1995, D4.
11. See Edward Gargan, "An Asian Giant Spreads Roots," New York Times, November 14, 1995, D1, D4, and "Asia Guide Calls Local Partners Key to Success," New York Times, November 14, 1995, D4.
12. Edward Gargan, quoting James Rohwer, author of Asia Rising: Why America Will Prosper as Asia's Economies Boom, in New York Times, November 14, 1995, D4.
13. David Sanger, "Real Politics: Why Suharto Is In and Castro Is Out," New York Times, October 31, 1995, A3.
14. James Tang notes that "the post-Cold War confrontation between East Asia and the West over human rights . . . has to be understood in the context of the spectacular economic development in the Asia-Pacific region." He observes that "some East Asian states seem to have drawn the conclusion that the East Asian model of development has proved to be more successful than the Western model" and have asserted "that their political systems and economic policies are better than the Western political models, and can offer an alternative vision of the values needed for a better world." See Tang, "Human Rights in the Asia-Pacific Region; Competing Perspectives, International Discord, and the Way Ahead," in Tang, ed., Human Rights and International Relations, p. 2.
15. See H.L.A. Hart, The Concept of Law (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961). Hart calls this set of standards "the rule of recognition": "To say that a given rule is [legally] valid is to recognize it as it as passing all the tests provided by the rule of recognition and so as a rule of the system. . . . There are therefore two minimum conditions necessary and sufficient for the existence of a legal system. On the one hand those rules of behaviour which are valid according to the system's ultimate criteria of validity must be generally obeyed, and, on the other hand, its rules of recognition specifying the criteria of legal validity and its rules of change and adjudication must be effectively accepted as comon public standards of official behaviour by its officials(pp. 100, 113).
16. On the relation between law and morals in legal positivism, see Hart, Concept of Law, ch. 9.
17. For elaborations of political morality and public sphere, see respectively, Ronald Dworkin, Law's Empire (London: Fontana, 1986), ch. 6 and Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989).
18. For elaborations of political morality and public sphere, see respectively, Ronald Dworkin, Law's Empire (London: Fontana, 1986), ch. 6 and Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989).
19. "Public" in "public international law" is a sociological term designating the realm of state activity as opposed to the private realm of the actions of individuals. The sociological use of the term should not be confused with the normative notion of the public sphere (Öffentlichkeit) which lies resoutely within the private realm since it is the public sphere of civil society.
20. For an analogous justification of basic human rights from the standpoint of liberal political philosophy, see John Rawls, "The Law of Peoples," in Stephen Shute and Susan Hurley, eds., On Human Rights: The Oxford Amnesty Lectures 1993 (New York: Basic Books, 1993), 41-82.
21. G.W.F Hegel, The Philosophy of Right, T.M. Knox, trans. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), § 330, p. 212. Hereafter PhR.
22. "All men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator, with certain inalienable Rights."
23. "Constitutionalism and Human Rights," in Louis Henkin and Albert J Rosenthal, eds., Constitutionalism and Rights-The Influence of the United States Constitution Abroad (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 383-95, p. 388.
24. See also Etienne Balibar, "'Rights of Man' and 'Rights of Citizen-The Modern Dialectic of Equality and Freedom" and "What Is a Politics of the Rights of Man?" in Masses, Classes and Ideas; Studies on Politics ana Philosophy Before and After Marx (New York: Routledge, 1994), 39-59 and 205-225 respectively, for a similar argument about the risky, open-ended and nonnatural nature of human rights based on a reading of the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.
25. Immanuel Kant, Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, Lewis White Beck, trans. (New York Macmillan, 1987), pp. 46-7, Ak 428-9. Hereafter FMM
26. FMM, p. 53, Ak 435.
27. Wong Kan Seng, "The Real World of Human Rights," Tang, ed. Human Rights and International Relations, p. 245.
28. Bangkok Declaration, 29 March 1993, reprinted in Tang, ed., Human Rights and International Relations, 204-207,p. 204.
29. Bangkok Declaration, 205.
30. Hegel, PhR, § 331,p. 212 and § 337, Remark,p. 215, emphasis added. I will throughout translate Geist as "spirit" instead of "mind" in the Knox translation.
31. PhR, § 333, Remark, p. 214.
32. Bangkok NGO Declaration and Response to the Bangkok Declaration, March 29 and April 3, 1993, reprinted in Tang, ed. Human Rights and International Relations, 208-212, p. 209.
33. See the contributions to Julie Peters and Andrea Wolper, Women's Rights, Human Rights - International Feminist Perspectives (New York: Routledge, 1995).
34. See Arati Rao, "The Politics of Gender and Culture in International Human Rights Dis" course," in Peters and Wolper, eds., Women's Rights, 167-175.
35. See Rhoda E. Howard, "Women's Rights and the Right to Development," in Peters and Wolper, eds., Women's Rights, 301-313.
36. "We are entitled to join hands in solidarity to protect human rights world-wide. International solidarity transcends the national border, to refute claims of State sovereignty and of non-interference in the internal affairs of the State," p. 209.
37. For instance, in his analytical account of an alternative ("Asian") normative theory of human rights which respects cultural diversity, Joseph Chan makes repeated appeals to the good faith of rational collective actors at various levels. See Chan, "The Asian Challenge to Universal Human Rights: A Philosophical Appraisal," in Tang, ed., Human Rights and International Relations, 25-38.
38. See Dieter Henrich, "The Contexts of Autonomy: Some Presuppositions of the Comprehensibility of Human Rights, in Aesthetic Judgment and the Moral Image of the World (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), 59-84, p. 84: "If one advocates rights generally, it must be because of their universal validity. But then, it must be possible to clarify rights within the context of other cultures and traditions-which again implies that we acknowledge their incompatibility with some forms of life and self-image. Nevertheless, it would have to be shown that real possibilities of life are opened up within their context-and not just those from which the political institutions of the West arose."
39. This causal dependence exists even though human rights considerations are not technically part of trade negotiations as in the case of China's preferential trade status or its admission into the World Trade Organization. See David E. Sanger, "U.S. Again Tries a Trade Issue as a Carrot and Stick for Beijing," New York Times, December 15, 1995, A7: "'But we are now sending them the message that while human rights is not explicitly part of the negotiations, it is part of the atmosphere, and they are ignoring that at their peril.'"
40. See Chakravarthi Raghavan, Recolonization: GATT, the Uruguay Round and the Third World (Penang: Third World Network, 1990), 38-40. The rest of this paragraph is a summary of the argument of Raghavan's book.
41. Vandana Shiva, "Biodiversity: A Third World Perspective" Monocultures of the Mind-Biodiversity, Biotechnology and the Third World (Penang: Third World Network, 1993), 65-93, p. 80.
42. Shiva, "Biotechnology and the Environment," Monocultures of the Mind, 95-131, pp. 122-3.
43. See Reginald Chua, "Take Proven Path to Growth, SM Urges Manila," Straits Times, November 18, 1992, 2.
44. Singapore is the sixth largest investor in the Philippines. See, for instance, Reginald Chua, "Ramos to Woo S'pore Industries to Relocate in Philippines," Straits Times, February 11, 1993, 13 and "Ramos Happy with S'pore Investments," Straits Times, February 16, 1995, 18.
45. Singapore is the sixth largest investor in the Philippines. See, for instance, Reginald Chua, "Ramos to Woo S'pore Industries to Relocate in Philippines," Straits Times, February 11, 1993, 13 and "Ramos Happy with S'pore Investments," Straits Times, February 16, 1995, 18.
46. Flor Contemplacion was a Filipino maid who was convicted of killing another Filipino maid and a four-year-old Singaporean boy. She was sentenced to death, and was hanged by the Singaporean government on March 18, 1995. The case provoked great public outcry in the Philippines and led to severe strains in diplomatic relations between Singapore and the Philippines. In the wake of the Michael Fay incident, the U.S. media portrayed the hanging as another example of the authoritarianism of the Singaporean state. The Contemplacion incident is, thus, a libidinal site for the articulation of U.S. relations with both Singapore (a competing model of capitalism that provides a destination fcr exploitative labour practices) and its former colony. The U.S. media coverage represses the previous history of U.S. colonial exploitation which created the oppressive conditions that make domestic labour migration necessary to sustain the Philippines economy. See also the essay by Vicente Rafael in mis issue.
47. I have discussed the limits of the normative concept of the public sphere in "Violent Light: The Idea of Publicness in Modern Philosophy and in Global Neocolonialism," Social Text 43 (Fall 1995): 163-90.
48. For "global civil society" and the limitations of the concept, see Martin Shaw, "Civil Society and Global Politics: Beyond a Social Movements Approach," Millennium: Journal of International Studies 23, 3 (1994): 647-67, p. 650: "Civil society can be said to have become globalised to the extent that society increasingly represents itself globally, across nation-state boundaries, through the formation of global institutions. . . . The emergence of global civil society can be seen both as a response to the globalisation of state power and as a source of pressure for it."
49. Cf. M.J. Peterson, "Transnational Activity, International Society and World Politics," Millennium: Journal of International Studies 21, 3 (1992): 371-88, p. 386: "[S]ocietal actors need states. Though political philosophers and visionaries have looked for alternate institutions, a state or something like it appears necessary to provide minimal security, guarantee property rights and help enforce contracts-all three of which are necessary to the good functioning of civil society and the activities of its members."
50. To give two examples, Vandana Shiva points out that "sustainable development" and "the Green Revolution" have been co-opted by TNCs and the World Bank in their drive towards biodiversity-destroying agricultural modernisation. In his discussion of the precariousness of people's diplomacy in the Philippines, Francisco Nemenzo points to the paradox of the current conjuncture where the appeals of people's diplomacy to world public opinion to place pressure on the government to respect human rights are less effective as a result of the benign image of the Ramos/Aquino regime in the international media and the decline in U.S. interest in the Philippines because of the loss of its military bases. See Nemenzo, "People's Diplomacy and Human Rights: The Philippines Experience," in Tang, ed., Human Rights and International Relations, 112-124.
51. Arati Rao, "The Politics of Gender and Culture in International Human Rights Discourse," in Peters and Wolper, eds., Women's Rights, p. 171.
52. Rao, "Politics of Gender," p. 171, emphasis added.
53. "Introduction," Southeast Asian Tribal Groups and Ethnic Minorites, Cultural Survival Report 22 (1987): 1-15, p. 11.
54. Jacques Derrida, "Declarations of Independence," New Political Science 15 (Summer 1986): 7-15, pp. 9-10.
55. Rural Development and Human Rights in South East Asia (Penang: International Commission of Jurists and Consumer Association of Penang, 1982), pp. 173-4.
56. "Perpetual Peace-A Philosophical Sketch," in Kant, Political Writings, Hans Reiss, ed., H. B. Nisbet, tans. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 98-99. Cf. Kant's discussion of cosmopolitan right (ius cosmopoliticum), §62, The Doctrine of Right, The Metaphysics of Morals (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 158-9.
57. "Perpetual Peace-A Philosophical Sketch," in Kant, Political Writings, Hans Reiss, ed., H. B. Nisbet, tans. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 98-99. Cf. Kant's discussion of cosmopolitan right (ius cosmopoliticum), §62, The Doctrine of Right, The Metaphysics of Morals (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 158-9.
58. Nicholas J. Wheeler, "Pluralist or Solidarist Conceptions of International Society: Bull and Vincent on Humanitarian Intervention," Millennium: Journal of International Studies 21, 3 (1992): 463-87, p. 476.
59. As the Budapest School philosopher, György Markus, points out, this is an aestheticising conception of normativity "since it resolves the seeming contradiction between the historicity of origin and the universal validity of norms on the analogy of the historical situatedness and atemporal significance of 'classical' works of art." See György Markus, "Political Philosophy as Phenomenology-On the Method of Hegel's Philosophy of Right," Thesis Eleven (forthcoming).
60. See Fredric Jameson, "Cognitive Mapping," in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, eds., Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 347-360, and more generally, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991).
61. See Fredric Jameson, "Cognitive Mapping," in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, eds., Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 347-360, and more generally, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991).
62. Derrida has developed this infinite idea of justice into an account of a New International based on the notion of a global democracy to come. See Specters of Marx-The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International (New York: Routledge, 1994). In my view, his New International is rather feeble because it is not institutionally grounded. In contradistinction, I am using Derrida's notion of justice-in-violation to flesh out an account of the normativity of existing human rights practical discourse.
63. "Force of Law-'The Mystical Foundation of Authority,'" Cardozo Law Review 11 (1990): 919-1045, p. 965, Hereafter FL.
64. Cf. Geoffrey Bennington, Jacques Derrida (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), pp. 279-82: "this movement, which would traditionally be represented as a movement upward . . . is . . . at the same time, a movement 'downward' for it is the empirical and the contingent, themselves necessarily displaced . . . toward the singular event and the case of chance, which are found higher than the high . . . in height's falling. . . . [T]he quasi-transcendental . . . is not to be taken as a historicizing or cultural relativizing of the transcendental. . . . [A]ny attempt to explain transcendental effects by invoking history must presuppose the historicity of that same history as the very transcendental which this system of explanation will never be able to comprehend."
65. Derrida, Give Time - I. Counterfeit Money (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 30.
66. For the methodological presupposition of the general text, see Jacques Derrida, "Politics and Friendship," in E. Ann Kaplan and Michael Sprinker, eds., The Althusserian Legacy (New York: Verso, 1993), 183-231, p. 223: "Precisely for the reason that through difference, the necessary reference to the other, the impossibility for a presence to gather itself in a self-identity or substantiality, compels one to inscribe the reality effect in a general textuality or differential process which, again, is not limited to language."