Human Rights and Memory

1. The Ubiquity of Human Rights in a Cosmopolitan Age

1 the ubiquity of human rights in a cosmopolitan age Once we had a country and we thought it fair, Look in the atlas and you’ll find it there: We cannot go there now, my dear, we cannot go there now. This excerpt from a poem by W. H. Auden, written shortly before the outbreak of World War II, is a poet’s outcry for a more humane world, for a world without cruelty. It is a poet’s wish that his words can make for a better world by displaying compassion for others. Today, this outcry is couched in the language of human rights, which seems to be everywhere. Human rights mean much to many, but also many different things. As a new universal language, they have been surprisingly underconceptualized . Are we talking politics? If so, what kind of political implications do human rights have? Or are we talking aesthetics, which implies a kind of “human rights experience” without a great many political consequences? This brings us full circle to the outcries of poets and intellectuals. Nevertheless, there is agreement that human rights matter. Contemporary societies are suffused with images making just this point. Imagine yourself watching pictures on TV or on the Internet. They show brutal beatings, people being forcibly evicted from their homes, or soldiers assaulting innocent civilians parade before your eyes. This is no movie clip, but rather actual images from realities nearby or far away. What do 2 human rights and memory we make of these pictures? Do we have a language that can make sense of them? All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood. Thus states Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. These are noble words, but do they have political meaning, and, if so, what are their implications? Are they consequential? The language of human rights provides us with a framework to begin to understand why pictures of strangers being beaten and tortured by other strangers concern us. Why do we care? Should we care? What is it about the power of human rights that makes us find these scenes revolting? Has this always been the case? If not, does this mean that our relation to human suffering, our passion for human rights, is not a given but is historically contingent? If so, what historical contingencies have made us more responsive to the sufferings of strangers? Human rights and allegiance to them is a rather recent phenomenon. Who can afford to be against human rights? At least rhetorically, human rights have become a kind of universal currency in politics. Clearly, this alone does not guarantee a world without violations. Even when viewed as simply a Western ideological move or just another sophisticated form of colonial imposition, human rights have turned into a global phenomenon that must be reckoned with. This book is an attempt to show how we reached this particular point in history. One of the most serious obstacles to fulfilling the ideals of human rights is the proclaimed sovereignty of nations. Human rights declarations are formulated as a set of rules, regulations, and norms challenging sovereignty. The principle of “noninterference” in so-called internal affairs is exactly the opposite of the human rights regime,1 which claims that there is no such thing as “internal affairs.” When it comes to certain types of abuses, human rights are about humans and not about members of specific states. The end of the cold war in 1989 and the emergence of global interdependencies have highlighted the tensions between the imperatives of a human rights regime and the prerogatives of sovereignty.2 This means that sovereignty—the prerogatives of the bounded state, the political community, the bounded “we”—has hitherto taken precedence over the unbounded universal “we.” human rights in a cosmopolitan age 3 With the fall of the “Iron Curtain,” one of the most important divisions of the latter half of the twentieth century collapsed: the world was no longer split into the “free world” and “Iron Curtain” countries. This division, however, has been superseded by another dichotomy: those who violate human rights and those who do not. National and ethnic conflicts such as those in the former Yugoslavia and in the Middle East are being interpreted by a global audience as human rights problems...