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Human Rights and Foreign Policy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 June 2011

J. Donnelly
J. Donnelly
Affiliation:
College of the Holy Cross
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Abstract

Five recent books reveal the beginnings of important new work in conceptualizing the place of human rights concerns in national foreign policies. The moral force of claims of human rights requires that they be given serious consideration in foreign policy. Philosophical analysis also shows that categorical moral distinctions between personal (or civil and political) and economic and social rights must be abandoned. Any justifiable priority for one class of rights must rest on strategic or political, not conceptual or moral, grounds. Since human rights are only one of many foreign policy concerns, tradeoffs with other goals, interests, and values will be necessary. However, human rights and the national interest are often complementary. The “tradeoffs” actually made should be principled, instrumental decisions, rather than apparently ad hoc or cynical sacrifices of human rights.

Type
Review Articles
Information
World Politics , Volume 34 , Issue 4 , July 1982 , pp. 574 - 595
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1982

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References

1 That it is also something of an infant industry, outside of international law at least, is suggested by the prevalence of collections of essays, the essay being a particularly appropriate form for new inquiries. In addition to the three collections under review here, see, for example, Kommers, Donald P. and Loescher, Gilburt D., eds., Human Rights and American Foreign Policy (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1979)Google Scholar; Hevener, Natalie K., ed., Dynamics of Human Rights in U.S. Foreign Policy (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books, 1980)Google Scholar; Pollis, Adamantia and Schwab, Peter, eds., Human Rights: Cultural and Ideological Perspectives (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1980)Google Scholar; Rosenbaum, Alan S., ed., The Philosophy of Human Rights: International Perspectives (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1980)Google Scholar; and Kamenka, Eugene and Tay, Alice Ehr-Soon, eds., Human Rights (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1978).Google Scholar

2 For a detailed critical discussion of Beitz's essay, and an argument that a natural rights theory is superior to the social justice model, see Donnelly, Jack, “Human Rights as Natural Rights,” Human Rights Quarterly, IV (August 1982).Google Scholar

3 See General Assembly Resolutions 217A (III) of 10 December 1948, and 2200A (XXI) of 16 December 1966. These treaties and resolutions have been widely reprinted. See, for example, Sohn, Louis B. and Buergenthal, Thomas, eds., Basic Documents on International Protection of Human Rights (Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs-Merrill, 1973)Google Scholar, an especially useful collection of primary documents.

4 The best known, but certainly the crudest, defense of such a position is Cranston, Maurice, What are Human Rights? (London: Bodley Head, 1973).Google Scholar A particularly interesting argument is presented by Melden, A. I., in Rights and Persons (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977)Google Scholar, chap. 6.

5 Exactly why this is called an argument from cultural priority, and how it is significantly different from the argument from interdependence, is unclear to me. I will therefore address only Bedau's first four arguments.

6 Cf. Berlin, Isaiah, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” in Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969).Google Scholar

7 See Beitz (Brown and MacLean, 48–51), for additional arguments against priority for civil and political rights, on the grounds of inalienability, uncontroversiality, generality, and universality of economic and social rights.

8 This widely reprinted speech (see, for example, Kommers and Loescher [fn. 1]) is the clearest statement of the Carter policy. The absence of even a suggestion of a compelling theoretical reason for the list advanced is noteworthy; it may help to explain the ease with which the administration fell back into pursuing civil and political rights almost exclusively.

9 Pollis and Schwab (fn. 1) cover similar ground, although the contributions to that collection are, as a whole, decidedly inferior. The issue is also addressed in Kommers and Loescher (fn. 1), part III, and Rosenbaum (fn. 1), part I. For a thorough, and largely critical, discussion of this literature, including a fairly extensive bibliography, see Donnelly, Jack, “Human Rights and Human Dignity: An Analytic Critique of Non-Western Human Rights Conceptions,” American Political Science Review, Vol. 72 (June 1982).Google Scholar

10 Dworkin, , Taking Rights Seriously (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977), XI, 90ff.Google Scholar, and throughout.

11 One recent exception is Goodin, Robert E., “The Development-Rights Trade off: Some Unwarranted Economic and Political Assumptions,” Universal Human Rights, 1 (April-June 1979), 31–42.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

12 See, for example, Haas, Ernst B., “Human Rights: To Act or Not to Act?” in Oye, Kenneth A., Rothchild, Donald, and Lieber, Robert J., eds., Eagle Entangled: U.S. Foreign Policy in a Complex World (New York: Longman, 1979), 193.Google Scholar

13 The first part of Falk, Richard A., “Theoretical Foundations of Human Rights,” in Newberg, 65–109Google Scholar, provides a nice analytic survey of competing conceptualizations of, and systems for dealing with, the behavior that is considered “intervention” in international law. The essay has been reprinted, along with several of Falk's other recent articles, in Human Rights and State Sovereignty (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1981).

14 No formal complaints are possible under the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights. Article 23 lists the conclusion of conventions, the adoption of recommendations, technical assistance, and regional and technical meetings as the appropriate means of international action under the treaty. In the case of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, a special (revocable) declaration is required to authorize the receipt of complaints (see Article 41).

15 On the general topic of humanitarian intervention, see Lillich, Richard B., ed., Humanitarian Intervention and the United Nations (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1973)Google Scholar; Franck, Thomas M. and Rodney, Nigel, “After Bangladesh: The Law of Humanitarian Intervention by Military Force,” American Journal of International Law, Vol. 67 (April 1973), 275–305CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Moore, John Norton, ed., Law and Civil War in the Modern World (Baltimore, Md.: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974).Google Scholar

16 Aside from Walzer, , Just and Unjust Wars (New York: Basic Books, 1977)Google Scholar, chaps. 4 and 6, see Beitz, Charles R., Political Theory and International Relations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979)Google Scholar, part II; Luban, David, “Just War and Human Rights,” Philosophy and Public Affairs, IX (Winter 1980), 160–81Google Scholar; Walzer, Michael, “The Moral Standing of States,” Philosophy and Public Affairs, IX (Spring 1980), 209–29Google Scholar; and replies to Walzer by Beitz, “Nonintervention and Communal Integrity,” Luban, “The Romance of the Nation State,” and Doppelt, Gerald, “Statism Without Foundations,” in Philosophy and Public Affairs, IX (Summer 1980), 385–403.Google Scholar

17 Walzer (fn. 16), 90.

18 Whatever value this typology has as a tool of comparative analysis (and even here it is rather crude), its relevance to human rights questions is at best dubious. Many authoritarian regimes have absolutely abysmal human rights records. For a powerful personal account of torture and other violations of human rights in “merely authoritarian” Argentina, see Timerman, Jacobo, “Reflections: No Name, No Number,” The New Yorker, Vol. 57 (April 20, 1981), 45–130.Google Scholar

19 This point is especially worth considering in American foreign policy. Vogelgesang suggests that pursuit of human rights is essential to the American dream. Tracy Strong, in “Taking the Rank with What is Ours: American Political Thought, Foreign Policy, and Questions of Rights” (Newberg, esp. 43–45 and 50–54), presents a similar argument. Even if only an expression of an “ugly American” self-righteousness, it is a self-righteousness that runs deep and must be accounted for in the formulation of policy.

Vogelgesang also suggests that “promotion of human rights may be most significant, not for the answers it gives, but for the questions it raises” about American domestic and international priorities (p. 157). She concludes: “Violations of human rights constitute a global nightmare. How Americans deal with that nightmare may determine what happens to their Dream” (p. 271). Although that is something of an overstatement, it is an important point to consider.

20 Cf. Hoffmann, Stanley, Duties Beyond Borders: On the Limits and Possibilities of Ethical International Politics (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1981), 125Google Scholar: “Equality consists of treating different things differently, not equally. And inconsistencies are inevitable, for many reasons.” Hoffmann defends such “inconsistency,” much as I do; but the term “inconsistency” misses, or misrepresents, the point.

21 The case studies in the other books reviewed here are of a different sort. Vogel-gesang, in line with her more journalistic approach, examines three “typical” individual victims—a Cambodian refugee, a Soviet dissident, and a Salvadoran peasant. These cases present an often very effective depiction of the practical, personal consequences of human rights violations. The essays in Newberg's collection tend to be more concerned with economic tradeoffs; see, for example, Barnet, Richard J., “Human Rights Implications of Corporate Food Policies” (pp. 143–60)Google Scholar, and Elder, Joseph W., “Social Justice and Political Equality: Land Tenure Policies and Rural Development in South Asia” (pp. 161–86).Google Scholar

22 See, for example, Chomsky, Noam, “Human Rights” and American Foreign Policy (Nottingham, England: Spokesman Books, 1978).Google Scholar