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  • Defending Children’s Rights, “In Defense of Peace”Children and Soviet Cultural Diplomacy
  • Catriona Kelly (bio)

Across Europe during the decades after 1900, issues relating to children’s place in society began occupying a place of unprecedented importance in political discussion and in state planning. Concrete manifestations of the new trend included an increasing concern for child welfare or, to use the term often favored at the time, “children’s rights”; a sharpening recognition of “children’s needs” as a specific area of legislative and budgetary policy; and a growing emphasis on the requirement that the state should intervene in family relationships to ensure that children were properly treated.1 A landmark, in terms of international relations, was the first supra-national proclamation relating to the subject, the 1924 League of Nations Declaration on the Rights of the Child. This set down that (1) the child should be given the means requisite for normal development, both material and spiritual; (2) the hungry should be fed and the sick and backward cared for—“the delinquent child must be reclaimed and the waif must be sheltered and succoured”; (3) the child should be first to receive relief in times of distress; and (4) children should be made capable of earning a livelihood and protected against “every form of exploitation.” In return for this, the child “must be brought up in the consciousness that its talents must be devoted to the service of its fellow [End Page 711] men.”2 The sentiments expressed here were to prove longer-lasting than the League of Nations itself: its successor organization, the United Nations, returned repeatedly to the subject of children’s rights (particularly in one possible understanding of the term, children’s welfare) in its policy discussions, most prominently in the late 1940s, the late 1950s (in the run-up to the issuing of its own Declaration on the Rights of the Child in 1959), and during the 1970s and 1980s, culminating in the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child.

It would be naïve to assume that the prominence of children’s issues resulted from pure philanthropic concern. On the contrary: to an even greater extent than debate on other areas of human rights, discussion of the protection and autonomy of children provoked political point-scoring and assertion of claims to moral and ideological superiority. The process by which the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child came together was recalled by the editors of a recent collection of essays on children’s rights with a degree of weary cynicism:

As is frequently the case in the international human rights domain, the original initiative was motivated by a degree of political self-interest that was to be exceeded only by that which characterised the response of some of the governments which were opposed to the initiative…. The original draft on the basis of which the Commission of Human Rights decided to elaborate the convention was little more than a revamped version of the 1959 Declaration on the Rights of the Child with some singularly undemanding reporting provisions added on…. Partly for these reasons, the original proposal, put forward by Poland in 1978, was initially assumed by most Western governments to be little more than a propaganda ploy. Only when it became clear that the draft, as amended to give it a little more substance, would almost certainly gather enough political momentum to succeed, did other governments begin to formulate positive proposals rather than confining themselves to rearguard blocking manoeuvres.3

The binary positions that emerged, self-aggrandizing “propaganda ploys” on the one hand and “rearguard blocking manoeuvres” on the other, had little to do with concern for the human subjects to whom the Declaration of Rights related. In the peculiar circumstances of the Cold War, children’s rights, like other areas of international diplomacy, became an arena in which key points of political difference—the extent to which state control over the family was [End Page 712] ideologically desirable, the importance or otherwise of explicit political indoctrination—could be brandished, and where set positions of hostility or rapprochement could be adopted. Significantly, it was not until the Cold War was coming...

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