Human Rights and Memory

10. Human Rights and Sovereignty After 9/11

10 human rights and sovereignty after 9/11 hobbes’s return: human rights, terrorism, and fear of/for the state How does an institutionalized human rights regime circumscribe sovereign politics and international relations in the context of global terrorism? As much as the end of the cold war constituted an important juncture for the consolidation of the human rights regime, the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and their geopolitical aftermath have added a new urgency to debates about the political status of human rights and sovereign prerogatives (Cushman 2005). Terrorism challenges the political salience of human rights principles and frequently causes the state to revert to one of its founding imperatives: the provision of security for its citizens (Sznaider 2006). Only when people feel insecure enough do they appreciate the security the state can provide. Only when they fear nothing more than violent death will they accept the state as the ultimate protector. Antiterrorist measures and expanding executive powers frequently infringe upon civic rights and have led some to demand that sovereignty be less conditional (Ignatieff 2004). Terrorism shifts attention away from state abuse and redirects national memories to failures of the state to protect its citizens. Despite these challenges, however, or perhaps precisely because of them, even the national interest through which antiterrorist human rights and sovereignty after 9/11 143 measures are justified continues to be articulated in the global context of a human rights discourse. The recurrence of strong executive powers and national interest politics weakens international legitimacy and requires extensive justifications vis-à-vis human rights standards. Global interdependencies and the concomitant human rights rhetoric they have propelled are challenging the basic tenets of sovereignty (Beck and Grande 2007; Sassen 2006). Thus there has been a shift in the role of fear. Whereas the liberalism of fear could spark a human rights regime based on memories of dark and totalitarian times, a new illiberalism of fear evokes memories of the state of nature and fear of violent death. Although Hobbes developed his political theory in the midst of political turmoil, current suspensions of human rights are not taking place in the middle of political crises but in the context of ongoing political reconfigurations. International terrorism is occurring at a historical moment when the classic nation-state, a state that monopolized the means of violence and whose task it was to neutralize the fear of violent death, or at least direct it into civilized channels , is being transformed. As soon as the state is recognized as the only source of legitimate violence, people internalize the state’s authority as the “mortal god,” to employ Hobbes’s metaphor of the Leviathan. This means that the state is worshipped as the new legitimate god, replacing the sovereignty of the religious God. Sovereign regimes, especially those that feel threatened by terrorists, tend to fall back on classic notions of statehood—that is, to adopt the principle of security from violent death. While the human rights regime is a performative principle of political virtuosity where life, liberty, and the dignity of men are the main principles, the security principle must react to fears of its citizens in order to establish its authority. To paraphrase Arendt, human rights also mean that man’s rather than God’s command or the commands of the state should be the source of law. Thus the human rights regime replaces another regime, which was founded on the assumption that people must relinquish their liberty in order to be safe. In a world where citizenship and solidarity are based on global interdependencies, human rights are supposed to provide the glue that binds people to one another. 144 human rights and memory Since the terrorist attacks of September 11, international politics has left the realm of calculability, and the generally accepted rules of warfare have been renegotiated. The Westphalian order, grounded on the notion that a stable and peaceful political order can be maintained only by mutually supportive vows of nonintervention between political entities , no longer holds. The modern human rights regime is premised on the notion that the prevention of human suffering takes precedence over the principle of sovereignty. This is the opposite of Hobbes’s argument and runs counter to the state’s claim to provide security. The perceived suffering of strangers and the impulse to alleviate that suffering is one of the unintended consequences of the global process. Yet there is builtin tension...