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3. Sovereignty and Human Rights: The Hobbesian Challenge
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3 sovereignty and human rights: the hobbesian challenge There is a long-standing tradition in Western political thought of differences of opinion on the relationship between rights and sovereignty. Following Hobbes and the social contract theories, and in the aftermath of the French Revolution, the debate between Thomas Paine and Edmund Burke remains an instructive example of sociological discourse. According to Paine’s The Rights of Man (1791), there is no contradiction between rights and sovereignty. Free individuals transfer sovereignty to an authority (i.e., the government) for the protection of their rights. Paine’s essay was an answer to Edmund Burke’s criticism of the French Revolution and its notion of abstract rights. For Burke, a government commands people’s obedience because it exists as a community of memory beyond the lives of individuals. It is “a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born” (Burke 1790/1998, 96). For Burke, historical memory, perceived in terms of continuity, provides legitimacy for sovereignty . Paine subscribed to the opposite view: “It is the living and not the dead who are to be accommodated” (1791/1985, 64). Despite their differences , Paine and Burke shared the notion that contractual obligations are involved in the relationship of a specific community and a particular state (on these obligations, see also Booth 2001). This was the birth of modern nationalism and sociology, which shifted the idea of the nation 46 human rights and memory as a collection of followers to that of an institution that reconciled freedom and determinism (Beck and Sznaider 2006, 21). Shared historical memories provided a crucial mechanism through which these nations were invented and imagined. In the framework of the Paine-Burke argument , only the sovereign people were considered the principal embodiment of rights, and the nation-state was seen as its guarantor. Sovereignty is a central organizing principle that shapes collectivities’ cultural and political knowledge. According to this Aristotelian precept, states are vested with moral imperatives that justify sovereignty. How, then, can we combine an institutional approach with moral sentiments that are not natural but are based on memories of catastrophes? To gauge the strength of human rights on the basis not only of reason but also of sentiments requires a brief corrective to the dominant perspective that reduces the cultural relevance of human rights to the foundations of the continental French and German Enlightenment. Underlying this misconception are two different bodies of Enlightenment thought and their respective interpretations of reason and sentiments. Rather than view the rejection of human suffering as some kind of master narrative that emanates from a Kantian conception of reason, or a top-down civilizing process, compassion for and attention to the suffering of others actually originated in the Scottish Enlightenment (Sznaider 2001; Hunt 2007). The text most people think of as the platform of modern human rights campaigns is Kant’s “On Perpetual Peace,” published in 1795. Kant’s idea was that a stable and peaceful political order could only be constructed out of nation-states that made mutually supportive vows of nonintervention . This view was embodied to a large degree in the League of Nations and in the original UN charter, and can be considered in many ways to be the seed of the idea of modern international law. There is no escaping that Kant’s project regards the sovereignty of nation-states as sacrosanct. It is the central principle on which the entire structure is based. In the post–cold war world, this is precisely the view that human rights campaigns reject, as we show in greater detail below. Contemporary human rights politics starts from the accepted and now legally codified assumption that sovereignty is no longer inviolable . Rather, the highest principle is human well-being, and the greatest [3.91.106.157] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 14:11 GMT) sovereignty and human rights 47 obligation is to prevent suffering wherever it occurs. Kant’s system, based on mutually respected sovereignty, has been sidelined: if interventions are necessary to achieve this goal, sovereignty has to take a backseat. This form of reasoning was embodied in the Scottish Enlightenment, and specifically in the idea that duties are imposed by sympathy and benevolence , motivated by exposure to heart-wrenching stories. The Scots developed a theory of “moral sense,” addressing the problem of compassion. They considered “natural compassion” descriptive of human nature as well as normative (Hume 1751...