If human rights are our last utopia, it is on condition of understanding, as the American historian Sam Moyn points out, that they are not the human rights proclaimed at the end of XVIIIe century. Stimulating distinction, but which may seem conceptually too clear.
Human rights – these worthy heirs of “ human rights »Proclaimed at the end of XVIIIe Century-imposed themselves on universal conscience in the aftermath of the Second World War when the discovery of the death camps brutally highlighted the need to impose limits on the omnipotence of the nation state.
It is this thesis, received as an evidence both in common and in the best works relating to human rights, that beats the book that has just published the historian Samuel Moyn, of Columbia University. For the latter, human rights were only an peripheral element of rhetoric deployed both during the war and the day after it. In addition, and to the extent that no public consciousness of the holocaust existed in the aftermath of the conflict, these rights cannot be considered as a direct response to the genocide of the Jews. In reality, it was not in the mid -1940s but well thirty years later – in the second half of the 1970s – that human rights won under our “” last utopia “(Our” Last utopia »).
Human rights and human rights
Moyn’s demonstration is based on the presupposition that human rights, far from being the sons of “ human rights »Proclaimed at the end of XVIIIe century, are of a very different nature. The latter were articulated in a policy of building citizenship within an enclosed space, while the first promote a compassion policy turned outwards. Human rights were inseparably linked to the construction of the state and the nation, while human rights aim to transcend the state form. What seems obvious to us today – namely that the main object of human rights is to impose limits on the activity of the state – would be a foreign idea to human rights which aimed to define the citizenship and not to protect humanity. In other words, the alliance of human rights and the nation state would not be an unfortunate contingency but the very essence of these rights. If there was, at XIXe century, a movement in favor of human rights was that of “ liberal nationalism Who aimed at the protection of the rights of citizens in the national framework. Likewise, it is not sure that the social struggles of XIXe century and the first half of the XXe century have really contributed to the extension of the language of rights. On the one hand, the claim of social rights aimed to redefine citizenship, not to transcend the state. On the other hand, the appeal to rights has long been associated-especially during the interwar period-to the defense of the freedom to contract and to the right of property.
The false departure of human rights
This conservative capture of rights continued the day after the Second World War. Far from retrospective celebrations of “ 1948 », Moyn stresses that the theme of human rights only occupied a marginal place in the post-war period. Powerless to mobilize imaginations or to arouse a vast intellectual movement in their favor, both the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 and the European Convention on Human Rights of 1950 are only products “ minors From the time. “” Dead From their proclamation, human rights then suffer from being confined to the mere diplomacy of states within the framework of the United Nations and to be hardly claimed only by the currents of the personalism Christian-themselves quickly identified with anti-Communism And to the only defense of the Western world. Above all, human rights “ do nothing In the sense that they are unable to provide an answer to the great alternative of the hour – namely the choice between a communist model and a market economy tempered by the establishment of the welfare state. In Europe itself, the history of human rights is hardly, then, that of a “ footnote »In the reinvention of conservatism. In the same spirit, Moyn refutes the interpretation of decolonization in terms of struggle for human rights. If the anti -colonialists claimed human rights, it was because they heard it in their initial sense closely articulated in the construction of the State. It is the defense of national sovereignty that was prosecuted and not the defense of individual prerogatives ; The supremacy of the nation state, not its subordination to a global law.
Provisional, minimal and simple morality
If the movement in favor of human rights does not date from the post-war period or decolonization, how to explain that they have now imposed itself on the new lingua franca on the planet’s scale ? For Moyn, the boom in human rights would be explained above all by the failure of other utopias. After the stroke of Prague and the assassination of Allende ruined the hopes put into a “ socialism with a human face “, Human rights have imposed themselves on a provisional, minimal and simple morality located above and beyond politics-as evidenced by the emblematic trajectory of an organization such as Amnesty International. It is therefore not so much the globalization and crumbling of the nation state that would account for the success of human rights as the collapse of global political alternatives. Human rights neutrality-which had led to their marginalization in the post-war period, at a time when it was important to take sides-would explain their breakthrough in the late 1970s at a time when the new ideological climate lent itself to the claims to transcend the political.
The refusal of retrospective history
Based on the repeated refusal to read the story retrospectively by projecting our own dreams and aspirations, Samuel Moyn’s work presents a number of similarities, from the point of view of the method, with that published a year before One of his colleagues from Columbia, Mark Mazower, No Enchanted Palace. The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of United Nations. The latter also invited to a more critical reading of the United Nations beginnings and testifies to the same concern to avoid making the 1940s the birth certificate of our contemporary humanitarianism. In other words, instead of celebrating human rights by inventing ancestral filiations to them, it is better to recognize how newcomers are likely to be swept away, by other utopias. This is how, underlines Moyn in a recent article, that the very great prudence observed by Obama on this theme will only be surprised by those who believed that human rights were for a long time integrated from the American vision of the world. For an exact opposite of the thesis of Moyn, we can read the work of the political theory published this year Andrew Vincent who, in a more conventional way, considers the “ discovery »From the genocide of the Jews, decolonization and cold war like the main engines of a progressive emergence of a transnational language of rights.
Citizenship rights and humanity rights
Historians will be left to debate real moments of crystallization of what Elie Wiesel called our “ New secular religion – Debate to which the work of Moyn makes a contribution without a decisive doubt. On the other hand, one can, from the point of view of political thought, wonder about the line of rigid demarcation traced by the author between the “ human rights “(Term which has not really imposed itself in French) and the” human rights ». Moyn is surely right to remember that there is no strict equivalence between each other. From there to consider them as two distinct concepts unrelated to each other, there is a step, too cheerfully crossed. Write that human rights only aimed at the construction of citizenship within a given state while human rights would concern humanity across national borders seems somewhat expeditious. On the one hand, the news “ Human Rights Revolution “(Or human rights) – which Moyn demonstrates with talent that he only intervened in the late 1970s, even in the early 1980s – did not have the exclusive objective of imposing an international standard on States actions. It has also helped to define a number of social struggles – those of women, homosexuals, consumers, children … – in terms of “ new rights To conquer within established states. In this sense, it also contributed to a form of reinvention of citizenship “ national By a modification of the borders between the public and the private, between the universal and the individual – as shown, in particular, the work of Lefort, Rancière or Balibar. Curiously, Moyn seems to consider the development of human rights only from the angle of a new duty of empathy vis-à-vis a suffering humanity, and therefore only from the point of view of their implications for our transnational practices .
Conversely, can we limit the scope of “ human rights »Proclaimed at the end of XVIIIe a century sole desire to establish a sovereign state ? The fact that they were understood and that they embodied in a closed space does not detract from the fact that they also aimed to set limits to the power of the state thus established. In this sense, the individualist heart of human rights was a sign, sometimes beyond the intentions of its promoters, to a form of transcendence of their community of origin. The first criticisms of the declarations of rights were not deceived there when – from Joseph de Maistre to Carl Schmitt – they criticized the rights of the man for abolishing any border between foreign war and civil war due to risk of seeing the “ Human Rights Party “Inevitably identify with” Human race party ». In other words, if the work of Moyn has the immense merit of avoiding the trap “ to invent traditions To human rights and to recall the fragile and contingent character of their recent rhetorical triumph, the concern to avoid anachronism sometimes leads him to sweep with a back of the hand of filiations which are undoubtedly not only semantic.