Human Rights in Cross-Cultural Perspectives: A Quest for Consensus

15. Prospects for Research on the Cultural Legitimacy of Human Rights: The Cases of Liberalism and Marxism

Tore Lindholm 15. Prospects for Research on the Cultural Legitimacy of Human Rights The Cases of Liberalism and Marxism Introduction Constructive and critical concern with the cross-cultural foundations and legitimacy of universal human rights standards is no novelty. When in 1946 the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) was first prepared by the United Nations Division of Human Rights, serious efforts were made by its director, John Humphrey, and his staff to provide the United Nations Commission on Human Rights with culturally and historically diverse background materials.1 In 1947 UNESCO carried out a theoretical inquiry into the foundations of an international declaration of human rights, drawing on a large number of individual philosophers, social scientists, jurists, and writers from UNESCO member states. Late in the summer of 1947, the resulting report2 was forwarded to the Human Rights Commission in the hope that it "would help to clarify its discussion and to explore the ground for a constructive agreement."3 The report included a thirteen-page statement of "UNESCO's conclusions," drawn from answers to its long and detailed questionnaire, distributed to respondents in March 1947. This statement, "The Grounds of an International Declaration of Human Rights," was prepared in Paris in July 1947. "All rights derive," it says, "on the one hand, from the nature of man as such and, on the other, since man depends on man, from the stage of development achieved by the social and political groups in which he participates." Furthermore, a modern declaration of human rights must recognize that civil and political, as well as economic and social, rights "belong to all men everywhere without discrimination 388 Tore Lindholm of race, sex, language or religion . . . not only because there are no fundamental differences among men, but also because the great society and community of all men has become a real and effective power, and the interdependent nature of that community is beginning at last to be recognized."4 Also in 1947, the American Anthropological Association issued its well-known words of warning, authored by Melville Hcrskovits: Standards and values arc relative to the culture from which they derive so that any attempt to formulate postulates that grow out of the beliefs or moral codes of one culture must to that extent detract from the applicabilityof any Declaration of Human Rights to mankind as a whole. . . . The rights of Man in the Twentieth Century cannot be circumscribed by the standards of any single culture, or be dictated by the aspirations of any single people. Such a document will lead to frustration, not realization of the personalities of vast numbers of human beings.5 The preceding questions and concerns about cross-cultural foundations have been addressed repeatedly during the ensuing four decades by politicians , jurists, social scientists, philosophers, and others engaged in creating , implementing, or evaluating evolving international human rights standards and procedures. Although much work has been done in this field, definitive intellec tual progress has been hard to come by. Meanwhile the practical problems of making universal human rights norms to be understood and accepted worldwide arc more pressing than ever. I therefore welcome the fresh start recently undertaken by Abdullahi An-Nac im in several papers of his, most thoroughly in "Problems and Prospects of Universal Cultural Legitimacy for Human Rights."6 With An-Nac im (and most human rights observers), I share the view that in order to be able to remedy the widespread and alarming discrepanciesworldwide between the theory and the practice of human rights, we need to understand the underlying factors and forces that contribute to the persistence of such discrepancies. Furthermore, I share with An-Nac im the perhaps more controversial assumption that a significant portion of these factors and forces springs from a deficient legitimacy of human rights in cultures, traditions, and doctrines that are practiced and accepted as a matter of fact, explicitly or implicitly, by people in the contemporary world.7 This, then, is the task at hand: how to go about elucidatingculturally based support, indifference, and rejection of the full range of human rights The Cases of Liberalism and Marxism 389 standards, or parts thereof, in a cross-cultural, and potentially worldencompassing , perspective? For the purpose of this paper, the task is not to contribute to the study of the specifically juridical strengths and frailties of international human rights, nor to focus on structural explanations of human rights violations or compliance. The...