Human Rights in American Foreign Policy; From the 1960s to the Soviet Collapse by Joe Renouard (review)

There are historians who do dense narrative history with great attention to documenting the details. And there are other historians who use history to paint a big conceptual picture whose accuracy often leads to much debate. Joe Renouard is in the former camp, with his new book on human rights in US foreign policy during the middle and late stages of the Cold War. Samuel Moyn is in the latter camp, with his stimulating and widely read but controversial interpretations in The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History.

They both agree, as do others, that attention to human rights in US foreign policy increased more or less around 1970. However, they differ as to why. The subject is important and merits extended attention. For Moyn, “The best general explanation for the origins of this [human rights] social movement and common discourse around rights remains the collapse of other, prior utopias, both state-based and internationalist.”¹ That is, the push for international human rights is not just idealism but actually a utopian project, and attention to these rights took off only after the evident failures of two other utopian movements—communism, and national liberation from colonialism.

There is broad agreement that after the adoption of the UN Charter with its path breaking reference to human rights and adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by the UN General Assembly in 1948, not much of immediate importance happened on the world stage with regard to rights for some time (except in Europe). This suggests that political elites really did not engage in much negative learning from the German holocaust by making sure not to repeat genocide and other gross violations of human rights. They continued to prioritize traditional national interests such as power and independence even if overlaid with an ideological superstructure—e.g., anti-communism, anti-colonialism, or anti-capitalism. In fact, President Harry Truman did not consider the 1948 Declaration important enough to mention in his memoirs. Moyn goes too far in arguing that the push for human rights circa 1970 was a totally new development, without connection to antecedent talk about rights. However, for reasons of space, that point will not be pursued in depth here.

For Renouard, who cites Moyn² but does not directly engage with his arguments, US attention to human rights is part of the idealistic tradition and took off in the late 1960s because of a long list of international and domestic factors.³ The evident failure of communism and anti-colonialism to deliver on their promises is not among the factors he noted. There is good reason for this, Renouard is on the correct track, and this will be covered later in this review.

Communism in the West was widely considered a façade for self-serving autocratic rule long before circa 1970. Joseph Stalin had appealed to Russian nationalism rather than international communism during the dark days of World War II, shutting down the Comintern. In addition, the split between Stalin and Josip Tito, so clear by 1948, reaffirmed the continuing strength of some version of nationalism even by those identifying as communists. There are clear reasons why former communists wrote a book with the title The God That Failed in 1949.⁴ The Soviet crushing of the Hungarian uprising in 1956 only confirmed again what was widely known: Russian-led communism was less a utopian crusade based on international solidarity in pursuit of liberating people from exploitation, and more a fig leaf for an autocratic Russian Empire. A defensive fear of “encirclement” by hostile Western forces may have driven the Empire—the same fear perhaps found in Putin’s mindset today. However, the result of Soviet power remained an empire. It is strange that a respected historian like Moyn, now at Harvard, would ignore so much historical evidence about the early recognition of the failure of communism in the...