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Chapter 4 Imprisoned Manhood Civil and Political Rights Abroad During the Cold War, the United States sought to halt communist expansion by imposing democracy on Vietnam through violence. For many Americans, the loss of that war represented a crushing military defeat to U.S. stature as moral leader of the free world. To regain its prestige, in 1977 the Carter administration set a new course for America’s foreign policy. A human rights agenda became the focal point of international relations . On October 5, 1977, Jimmy Carter signed the UN’s International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR). This was indeed a significant international development. For twenty years, the United States had refused to sign this particular covenant because past administrations feared that taking such a moral stand on international affairs would inevitably raise embarrassing questions about America’s commitment to racial, gender, and social justice at home. The ICCPR extended the intent and scope of the Universal Declaration of Human rights by identifying fundamental civil and political freedoms to which each human being was entitled. Differing from the Declaration that emphasized economic, social, and, cultural rights, the ICCPR focused on five categories of rights to which member states were expected to adhere: protection of individual’s physical integrity against execution, torture, and arbitrary arrest; authorization of procedural fairness in law that includes rights upon arrest, basic conditions of imprisonment, rights to a lawyer, and rights to an impartial process in trial; protection against gender, religious, racial, or other forms of discrimination; guarantee of individual freedoms of belief, speech, association, press, right to hold assembly; and guarantee of the right to political participation, such as organizing a political party, voting, and voicing contempt for political authority. By placing human rights as the “fundamental tenet” of the U.S. foreign policy agenda, the Carter administration recognized that a new, more complex world was emerging from the vestiges of the old, as symbolized by America’s stunning military defeat in Vietnam. For the Carter administration, 138 the Cold War and the on-going tension between the United States, the Soviet Union, and China continued to be a major consideration in foreign policy matters. The interests and aspirations of nonaligned countries—many of whom were former European colonies—were, however, also making their presence known in international discourse. In his attempts to reposition America as a world power, in the eyes of both aligned and nonaligned countries, Carter relied upon principles of human rights as the foundation for establishing a common understanding for peace, freedom, and social justice among nations. To affirm his commitment he appointed Andrew Young, a former advisor to Martin Luther King and political strategist for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), as the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, the point person for his administration’s human rights agenda. To the utter dismay of many conservatives at the time, Carter, giving voice to his vision, announced to the world a new international reality that called for change. He responded with pragmatism: The Vietnamese war produced a profound moral crisis, sapping worldwide faith in our own policy and our system of life, a crisis of confidence made even more grave by the covert pessimism of some of our leaders. In less than a generation, we’ve seen the world change dramatically. The daily lives and aspirations of most human beings have been transformed. Colonialism is nearly gone. A new sense of national identity now exists in almost 100 new countries that have been formed in the last generation. Knowledge has become more widespread. Aspirations are higher. As more people have been freed from traditional constraints, more have been determined to achieve, for the first time in their lives, social justice. The world is still divided by ideological disputes, dominated by regional conflicts, and threatened by danger that we will not resolve the differences of race and wealth without violence or without drawing into combat the major military powers. We can no longer separate traditional issues of war and peace from the new global questions of justice, equity, and human rights. It is a new world, but America should not fear it. It is a new world, and we should help to shape it. It is a new world that calls for a new American foreign policy—a policy based on constant decency in its values and on optimism in our historical vision. (Carter, 1977) Carter recognized that the world was indeed changing, and, as...

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