Is it all about power?

The Japanese feminist Chizuko Ueno begins her book, The Ideology In Order to Survive, with an anecdote. In 1994, Ueno attended an international conference organized by the Japanese progressive journal Sekai and the French magazine Le Monde Diplomatique. At the end of the conference, a French speaker asked the audience: “Human rights is a concept that originated in France. Do you think it is universal?” 

“This is a tricky question to answer,” Ueno thought to herself. “If we answered yes, that means ‘you people in Asia also accept this French concept.’ And it also means to acknowledge French universalism. But if we answered no, that could mean ‘Asians are such un-enlightened people who can’t even accept the concept of human rights.’” 

After some pondering, however, Ueno thought of a better response: “Human rights is a special French concept. It claims to be universal, but it cannot reach the level of universality it claims, precisely because the West has had monopoly on it.”  

Much has changed in the ensuing 30 years since this debate took place. I can imagine the French speaker in this story now asking herself the same question as Nicholas Bequelin does in his recent Ideas Letter piece: “Can human rights survive the decline of global Western hegemony?”  

The “Beastly” Postwar International Order 

Instead of blaming the human rights movement itself, Bequelin sees the shifting international order as the decisive factor contributing to its decline. If “the main thrust of the human rights enterprise has always been to portray states and governments as beasts to be tamed, named and shamed into doing the right thing,” then this will no longer be viable as the “beast tamers” lose their relative power globally and even become beasts themselves.  

There has been a tremendous amount of ink spilled on Western hypocrisy, so I am reluctant to say more. But if the assumption is that the human rights system has been adequate so far in controlling beastly behaviors, it would be difficult to explain away the various wars America and Russia started and sustained throughout the postwar period, or the apartheid systems maintained by Israel and China against Palestinians and Uyghurs.   

Bequelin is right in suggesting that “the human rights movement must accept that it no longer commands the authority that it once had”. The question is: where did this authority come from in the first place? In his analysis, it came from the relative power of liberal states (even if some of these states had always acted beastly). But, if I can push it one step further, it also came from the willingness of these states to conduct diplomatic coercion in the name of universalism.  

A more technical component of his argument is the movement’s unwavering faith in ‘naming and shaming’ as a core tactic to get states to submit, which Bequelin warns is a tactic the movement may have to give up as a way to make concessions with non-Western states in order “for human rights to endure.” However, political scientists who study the information systems and public opinion in authoritarian states have long expressed skepticism about the efficacy of naming and shaming. As Jennifer Pan and other scholars demonstrated in a 2022 paper titled How Information Flowed from the World to China, “antagonistic content may reinforce rather than threaten government control” because it’s less likely to be censored, and fits right into the government’s domestic narrative that the West cannot tolerate the rise of China.  

If the authority of the human rights enterprise comes from beastly power itself, and naming and shaming doesn’t even work, then what do we have left? 

What is missing in this power-centric analysis is a deeper reflection on the movement’s own reliance on the postwar power configuration, which it had taken it for granted until recently. While human rights activists often consider themselves as promoters of universal values, they inevitably play a supportive role in the “soft power” campaign for the US and its allies. Politics aside, what does it mean to lose the power of monopolizing the language of human rights?  

If optimism is to prevail, it should not come from a mundane acknowledgement that this work is “forever challenging”, and therefore “setbacks are to be expected”. (In another word, have faith in human rights. It will bounce back!) The danger and the opportunity are one and the same: if the human rights system wants to create real moral authority, true universalism has to first challenge Western hegemony itself. We need to recognize the agency of countries that found themselves in a postwar order that they didn’t create, and to understand, while recognizing the unequal nature of this playing field, why would they continue to engage in multilateral spaces. What are the practical, political, and ideological reasons for doing so?  

Universalism vs Sovereignty: An Old Debate 

Bequelin observes that the growth of UN membership, from 50 in 1945 to 193 today, transformed the global space of human rights diplomacy while allowing human rights principles to “diffuse mechanically.”  

Without a contextual analysis, it can be difficult to understand how the power dynamics in multilateral spaces shifted. If we zoom in on the largest “growth spur” in the history of the UN, one cannot ignore why the number of members more than doubled between 1945 (51) and 1961 (104): there were three dozen or so new states in Asia and Africa that had achieved independence from their European colonial rulers. Their paths to join the “big boys’ table” was anything but straightforward.  

The case of the People’s Republic of China is also instructive. It had no place at the UN until 1971. Since 1945, the Republic of China, who’s central government retreated to Taiwan after losing the civil war to the Communists in 1949, was the sole representation of China, and a permanent founding member of the Security Council. Starting from the early 1960s, Albania (a key ally of the PRC due to their shared distain for the Soviet Union) began an annual resolution advocating for the PRC to join the UN, with growing support from African nations. Fearing the enlargement of the Communist bloc, the US introduced the “Important Question Resolution”, which required a two-thirds vote from the General Assembly in order to raise the threshold for resolutions advocating for a PRC seat at the UN to be passed. However, by the time Nixon became the president, he desperately wanted to end the Vietnam War therefore needed China on his side. The administration began secretly courting leaders of the PRC by promising a seat at the UN and moving US-China relations toward normalization. The ROC became a secondary concern.  

China knows this history well. And as historians begin to tap into archival materials that are becoming available in the US, an awareness is growing in Taiwan as well about how and why the ROC lost its seat in 1971. Given this history, it is not outrageous that a government like China’s would consider the “international community” a formidable power wielded by outsiders in order to meddle in its own domestic politics. It’d also be understandable if Taiwan no longer wanted to engage in multilateral spaces for similar reasons. (It was, after all, Chiang Kai-shek who gave up Taiwan’s seat at the UN out of a sense of disgrace, in the fashion of “宁为玉碎，不为瓦全”: “better to be a piece of broken jade than an intact tile.”¹) So why do both the PRC and the ROC today still care about their involvement in international spaces, including ones dedicated to human rights? 

For countries that gained their independence after the Second World War, they did not join the UN so they could be dominated by an international order they did not create. Understandably, governments of these countries would not be happy with their former colonizers questioning their newly established sovereignty – their legitimacy and their relationship with their own population – through grating declamations of ‘universality’. They joined in the hope of being able to exercise their agency by making the multilateral space reflect their history, ideas, and interests.  

The human rights bargain is as contradictory as it is aspirational. It asks that countries voluntarily give up elements of their sovereignty in order to gain something meaningful: not only survival and mutual respect, in a realpolitik sense, but also for their nation’s identity to be rooted in a basic framework of justice. The story a nation tells its citizens is always a key element of its legitimacy.  

Anyone who understands the history of decolonization will notice something crucial about how countries engage in multilateral spaces. In making a government legitimate, it is just as important to protect the sovereignty of one’s own nation as it is to adhere to an international framework of justice, equality, and accountability.  

That framework aspires to answer an important set of questions: what is there to be done when individual rights are harmed by the actions (or the lack of action) of a government? What is the responsibility of the international community? Who contributes to this community? How does it mediate between individuals and their government? Not only does answering these questions demand new ways of thinking about power dynamics between nations, it also demands on-going intellectual debates about the fundamental philosophy that undergirds that human rights system. It is only through these debates that states can see human rights values as their own – and therefore truly universal. 

This does not mean the international rights regime should make the strategic decision on whether to empower or disempower a particular state. Learning about local context and having a dynamic understanding of the role of the state in the realization of rights, should be a precondition. If done right, this may very well subvert the very notion that the function of the rights regime is “to police the public-private divide,” by claiming that “the purpose of political power is to subserve private power and to enable the free interaction of notionally free individuals in civil society,” as the legal scholar Gerard Quinn writes. 

Are we ready for the kind of debate that may shake the very foundation of liberal values? 

Protagonists and Patrons of Social Change 

Inspired by the question from France, Ueno and other Japanese scholars continued their discussion in scholarly journals and popular magazines in Japan. In one essay, she wrote that “it is a naïve Enlightenment perspective to see the contemporary history of human rights as a process of expanding the rights already enjoyed by the privileged to others across class, gender, and race.” In other words, to consider human rights standards as akin to ISO standards – created by experts, waiting to be “diffused mechanically” – is exactly the wrong approach. The point of human rights struggles is not about bringing everyone to the status of the oppressor. 

Bequelin is wise in advising, at the end of his essay, against the continuous reliance on “institutional Western patronage”. This does not necessarily mean finding new patrons. China, with its newfound economic and technical prowess, still prefers sovereignty over universalism, despite the Communist Party’s new language around “人类命运共同体 – a human community with a shared future” and all the pearl-clutching in the West about how it is taking over multilateral spaces in the absence of the US.  

That said, China is directing global conversations away from the human rights paradigm towards climate change, economic development, and finding technological solutions to social issues. Bequelin lamented: “as climate change and artificial intelligence move to the forefront of global priorities, human rights concerns will be pushed even further down what remains of the international agenda.” But seeing rights as a separate agenda, competing for global attention, has been problematic all along. The future of the rights regime will not be in its own legal universe, but one that depends on finding its relevance in other conversations.  

This is also a question of positioning. For people whose homes and ancestral land are being swallowed by rising sea levels or raging wildfires, for people who are surveilled and exploited by an algorithm, what can human rights mean to them? What remedies does it bring?  

My own human rights education did not come from a degree in international human rights law, but from the trenches of the disability movement in China. The revolutionary promise of the movement is never simply about including people with disabilities into the status quo, or to have one government replace another government. Instead, disability politics sees rights as relational. It questions the presupposed links between individual capacity, self-sufficiency and deservingness, and it challenges the assumption of human rationality which individual liberty should be based upon. All of these shake the philosophical ground of liberal values and contest the legalistic approach that is part and parcel to a traditional human rights regime.  

In 2008, the Chinese government was among the first batch of nations that became signatories of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD). The local disability movement quickly interpreted the text through the reality experienced by disabled people in China. None of us ever went to Geneva for treaty reviews, for fear of being in open opposition to the government. But a generation of parents, lawyers, teachers, social workers, and government officials would be trained by Chinese people with disabilities. In the following decade or so, this human rights treaty would be debated, and elements of it translated into local laws and policies in education, employment, health, and criminal justice, even as the treaty review process itself became more bureaucratic than meaningful as time went by.  

Nine years after China’s adoption, I attended the first domestic CRPD review in Taiwan. (Taiwan adopted five human rights treaties into domestic law, despite being excluded from the official treaty review processes.) I was impressed by how normal it seemed to have government representatives seated next to civil society representatives who were critical of their performance. At the same time, I was surprised by how CRPD trainings in Taiwan were rarely conducted by disabled people’s organizations. The received wisdom was that lawyers were more qualified to talk about international law, and that there’s nothing wrong with disabled people seeing their own rights through the eyes of a legal regime, interpreted by others who don’t share their everyday experience.  

It’s easy to see the limitations in each scenario. But I couldn’t help but notice the silver lining as movements on the ground exercise their agency. For people with disabilities in China, the vacuum left by the lack of professional human rights organizations was the fertile ground where the homegrown disability movement could take control of the revolutionary promise of the CRPD by making a piece of human rights treaty their own. Meanwhile, excluded from the multilateral human rights architecture, the local Taiwanese rights movement brought these debates home and convinced its government that the political identity of Taiwan lies in it being a democracy that respects human rights principles.  

Without the benefit of time, it’s almost impossible to tell which of these changes are merely bureaucratic and which are part of a deeper social change. But one thing is clear: the international human rights system is not in a position that can comfortably predict whether people can rewrite their own history, or whether broad social transformation is possible. 

To Be Optimistic, Or To Be Pessimistic? 

The French philosopher Simone Weil wrote the essay The Needs of the Soul in 1943 – the last year of her life – for the Free French Resistance Movement as a way to envision a regenerated France once the Germans had been driven back. In her opening paragraph, she writes:  

The effective exercise of the right springing not from the individual who possesses it, but from other men who consider themselves as being under a certain obligation towards him. Recognition of an obligation makes it effectual. An obligation which goes unrecognized by anybody loses none of the full force of its existence. A right which goes unrecognized by anybody is not worth very much.  

Bequelin’s reflection on the human rights movement’s mistake of taking “metrics” as “instruments for change” is a salient one – documenting rights abuses don’t lead to change on its own. He is also right in recognizing that speaking of harms endured is a key step in understanding oppression. But even there, the bigger question remains: who is the audience of all this speaking?  

When the audience is a human rights organization or the international criminal justice system, underwritten by liberal states, victims unavoidably speak the language that they think this powerful machine would understand. Historically, it had always been more difficult for women to articulate the injustice they suffer because when they appeal to the powerful for redress, they face a recognition barrier. Often, the framework they needed to tell their stories truthfully did not exist. This applies to all who are not blessed with political or material power. They are also the intellectual future of the human rights movement as new frameworks come alive through their telling. 

Perhaps the international human rights enterprise needs to be less of an authoritative arbiter, floating in a righteous space, holding standards, granting justice, bringing about social changes, with no obligations of its own. Not having the illusion of such an identity may, in the end, be more liberating than devastating.

LuHan Gabel is the associate director for The Ideas Workshop at Open Society Foundations.

1. Chen Tsui-lien, Revisiting the Political History of Post-War Taiwan: The Triangulated Tug-of-War between the United States, the Kuomintang Government, and Taiwanese Civil Society. 2023, p268) ↩︎