Constructing the Individual

From the Magna Carta to John Locke, the story of human rights is usually written from a doctrinal and juridical point of view. The social history of the individual is different and has not yet been written. We can trace the concept of the individual even to antiquity, with Sophocles’ Antigone as the greatest early example. We can follow it to 13th-century Milan, where, for the first time, a census counted heads and not families. We see it in renaissance German artist Albrecht Durer’s self-portrait of 1500, with which he challenged all religious and secular authority of his time. The individual as we know it, though, makes its appearance only in the 18th century, when a non-feudal society emerged and the individual claimed rights and freedoms against it. In spite of the globalization of economics and information, the cultures and feelings of the peoples of the world remain fundamentally diverse. Ten percent of the world’s population produces and consumes 70 percent of the world’s goods and services: unless we are ready to effectively and fully share our resources, providing social security for everybody in Africa and Asia, how can we impose only one facet of our society on the rest of the world? Many Muslim women feel that wearing a veil is central to their human dignity. What if Iran had the power of the United States and wished to impose its standards of female decency on Western women?

The West, unaware of the social foundations of its human-rights understanding­­—i.e. individualism, the cultural meaning of death, of the person, women, and social security—tries to project its view of human rights onto societies that do not possess the same concepts of these. The acknowledgment of difference in historical time and geography helps to elucidate the contested fields and to promote greater modesty when dealing with others.

Stones in a Glass House

But what about human rights in the United States? In 1993, the median net worth of a black family in the United States was US$4,418, while for a white family it was US$45,740. The average income of a black family is about half that of a white family. In the 25 years between 1976 and 1999, 497,030 persons were murdered in the United States. I do not know of many civil wars in Africa with so many victims. In 1999, 46.5 percent of all murder victims were black. The total income of the United States’ 12 million black households is approximately US$430 billion per year; the net worth of the 30 richest US citizens is approximately US$440 billion.

I do not mean that the West has no right to express concerns about human rights. There is a nucleus of rights that must be protected and practices that must be criticized. But it must keep its criticism and protest clear, using simple, measurable criteria. The ratio of political prisoners to total population is possibly one of the very few such reliable measures. But justice is blind, meaning that the West must not single out certain countries for whatever reasons and remain silent about others: justice requires comparison.

When US officials speak about human rights, they mean strategic interests and oil. From 1980 onwards, the West encouraged Iraq to attack Iran, delivered the weapons, and kept silent about the gassing of the Kurds. However, after 1990, when Iraq invaded US-allied Kuwait, threatening the US oil supply, sanctions were imposed. In the decade since, according to the United Nations Children’s Fund, approximately 600,000 Iraqi children have died as a result of the sanctions.

A basic principle of common law is that “he who comes to Equity must come with clean hands.” The United States certainly has no right to criticize others about human rights.

International Instruments

The 1993 Vienna World Conference on Human Rights was one of a series of great programmatic UN world conferences of the 1990s. The main item of discord was universalism vs. relativism. This question had been addressed very prominently at the preparatory regional conferences, in particular through the Bangkok Declaration of April 2, 1993, which protested the “neglecting of social and economic rights,” “double standards,” and the “politicization of human rights.”

In Vienna the problem could not be solved. Operative paragraph five of the Vienna Declaration therefore verbally combines both positions but does not resolve them substantially: universalists and cultural relativists alike can claim this paragraph in support of their respective positions.

Faced with this impasse, the West tends to affirm the formal side of the various international declarations and covenants. But the argument can easily be reversed: the General Assembly regularly votes a resolution (e.g. A/RES/48/125 of February 14, 1994) stressing “non-selectivity,” “impartiality,” etc. And what institution represents the peoples of the world more than the General Assembly of the United Nations does?

The French philosopher Blaise Pascal once wrote, “There are truths on this side of the Pyrenees which are falsehoods on the other.” Pascal effectively summed up the message of this article more than 300 years ago; that message is more important today than it has ever been in the past.