Human Rights and Memory

6. The Cold War Period: More Than One Universalism

6 the cold war period: more than one universalism The third period (1949–89) reflects the impact of the cold war on the dissemination of human rights values and vice versa. The conventional story line suggests that the cold war and its ideological divisions interrupted universal interpretations and forestalled a global outlook (Gaddis 2006; Judt 2005). The prospect of a human rights regime essentially went into suspended animation, with the first signs of resurrection coming during the ratification of basic rights documents in the 1970s. On the one hand, ideological divisions precluded the widespread dissemination of human rights protections, while on the other hand, the cold war constituted an important backdrop to both the articulation and the implementation of such protections. To fully grasp the impact of the cold war on the intersection of human rights and sovereignty, it is imperative to differentiate between two historical circumstances. The nascent conditions of the cold war, with its competing visions of universalism in the late 1940s and the politics of fear of the 1950s, were the context for the ideological division and de facto suspension of human rights. By contrast, the beginning of détente between the United States and the Soviet Union placed the issue of human rights in a context that saw the emergence of civil society movements, a growing involvement of nonstate actors, and transnational ties during the 1970s that challenged the primacy of the national sovereign. 84 human rights and memory the ideological scope of human rights From its inception, the cold war was an obstacle to transforming the human rights declarations of the postwar period into major features of international politics. The fact that the Soviet Union abstained from voting for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights when it was adopted on December 10, 1948, was not a particularly promising start but a predictable one. As mentioned above, the United States and the Soviet Union, the two victors in World War II, represented two different versions of universalism. The former stood for the universalism of individual liberties and a market economy and therefore showed an elective affinity with the basic contours of the human rights regime, while the Soviet system could not accept this regime as emancipatory since it was counterintuitive to its ideology of socialist emancipation. This had institutional and political consequences that turned human rights rhetoric into a weapon of the cold war, one that was no less effective than missiles. Cold war alliances and the reaffirmation of national sovereignties remained the pillars of international relations, which made the universalistic aspirations of the immediate postwar period as a globally binding ideal largely irrelevant. Nevertheless, the Declaration of Human Rights never vanished, and it became part of competing rights systems, as was evident in the distinction between political and civil rights, on the one hand, and economic, social, and cultural rights, on the other. The West focused on individuals’ civil and political rights and blamed the Soviet Union and other Communist states for violating them. Communist and nonaligned states emphasized collective rights, stressing social and economic issues. This division has informed debates on the nature and implementation of human rights protections ever since. As we shall see in our discussion of more recent developments, it is precisely the tension between these two approaches to human rights that defines the ongoing negotiations about the scope of the human rights regime (Beetham 1995; Falk 2000). The ideological fault lines that shaped the contours of a bipolar world also characterized the debates leading up to the ratification of the UN genocide convention in 1948. While the United States pushed for a broad the cold war period 85 definition of genocide that would include Stalinist atrocities, the Soviet Union tried to tie the notion of genocide as closely as possible to the extermination policies of the Nazis. As the former ally (USSR) became the prime antagonist, and the former enemy (Germany) an important partner, Nazism and Communism were now viewed as comparable regimes and subsumed under totalitarianism theories. The fact that human rights violations and blatant disregard for many of the norms sustaining them abounded as well explains why the protection of human rights remained stranded in the rhetorical realm of a declaration alone. The cold war and the accompanying political developments of the era amounted to a politics of fear, and not only the fear that politics could be turned into a mechanism of violence and terror...