Two centuries ago the American and French Revolutions brought forth the natural law concept of inalienable human rights. However, it took nearly two centuries of wars, political and social disasters, and decolonization before this idea became globally accepted, at least in theory.
In the beginning, the idea of human rights was limited to domestic politics. In international relations, power, not right, continued to be the only thing that mattered: the traditional concept of state sovereignty focused exclusively on power, i.e., on control over people and territory, and protected the state’s authority, regardless of whether its enforcement was civilized or brutal, democratic or authoritarian.
The Nuremberg Trials of the German war criminals after World War II marked the first important change in the world’s understanding of the concept of sovereignty. For the first time, an entire state leadership was put on trial for its crimes, as its representatives and henchmen were brought to justice.
The Nuremberg Trials and, in parallel, the creation of the United Nations and its Universal Declaration of Human Rights, signaled the growing importance of law in international relations. Sovereignty was no longer based solely on power, but increasingly on law and respect for the rights of citizens.
This process was largely frozen during the five decades of the Cold War.
But human rights and the rule of law began to re-emerge as a theme of Western policy, especially in the wake of the Helsinki Conference on European Security and Cooperation and its use by the administration of US President Jimmy Carter, as well as by numerous non-governmental advocates protesting the treatment of Soviet dissidents.
The next big step was the emergence of the concept of humanitarian intervention after the genocide in Rwanda and the Balkan wars in the 1990’s. As a result, international law came to recognize the “right of protection against governmental arbitrariness and states’ crimes against their own people, even though enforcement remains quite uncertain.
Finally, the same developments in politics and international law led to the creation of the International Court of Justice. With its establishment, resulting from long and terrible experience, the basic idea of modernity – that the power of states and their rulers should be subject to the rule of higher law, thus placing individual rights above state sovereignty – has taken a great step forward.
This development was anything but accidental. In the face of the totalitarian challenges of fascism and communism in the twentieth century, Europe and the United States have become aware that the rule of law, separation of powers, and democracy decisively determine foreign policy and matter greatly from the point of view of international security. Democracies have proved to be much more peaceful than authoritarian regimes and dictatorships.
But the progress achieved so far is again under threat. China’s rise and Russia’s resurgence suggest that there is no necessary link between economic development, on the one hand, and political and cultural modernization, on the other. In particular, China’s breathtaking economic success seems to point to the existence of viable authoritarian alternatives to the Western idea that freedom, democracy, the rule of law, and the market economy are bound together. Indeed, China appears to suggest that selective modernization is possible (modernization à la carte, so to speak), allowing states to choose to implement only those elements of modernity – technology, economics, infrastructure, political institutions, and values – that they like.
But modernization à la carte is an illusion. Its proponents forget the experience of the first half of the twentieth century, when authoritarian modernization was tried in both Germany and Russia -with disastrous results.
In the medium term, modernity is indivisible: you can have all of it or none.
The deep technological and social changes unleashed by the forces of modernity create tensions that, in the end, cannot be resolved without appropriate normative and institutional responses.
China and Russia today are no exceptions. The symptoms of the disease of selective modernization are clearly discernible in both countries in the form of ubiquitous corruption. China, for example, faces increasing export difficulties because of deficient control of the safety of its products, which is largely the result of corruption. Without a commitment to a free press and an independent judiciary, these difficulties will only intensify.
Before too long, Russia’s “managed (read: authoritarian) modernization will also have to allow for the rule of law and a functioning separation of powers, or the country will remain dependent on oil and gas prices and mired in a brutal struggle for power, influence, and money. Moreover, neither oil and gas deposits nor imperialist policies will stop Russia’s decline. Without functioning democratic institutions, Russia’s second attempt at selective modernization will fail just as certainly as its previous, Soviet incarnation did. In the globalized world of the twenty-first century, in which crises in one part of the world spread like wildfire to others, selective modernization, based on suppression of the conflicts and tensions that modernization generates, is likely to be even more dangerous. Indeed, while the greatest threats to peace once came from power politics and economic rivalry, they now increasingly derive from the regional and global repercussions of the political and social disintegration of stable countries, a decline of their normative and institutional systems, and new totalitarian ideologies.
This is why the opposition between so-called “realists and “idealists in foreign policy, and between proponents of “hard and “soft power, is proving to be a thing of the past. To be sure, states are still following traditional interest-oriented policies. But such policies will be less and less able to guarantee peace and stability in the future. In the twenty-first century, human rights and security will be inextricably intertwined. Such is the outcome of globalization, i.e., the mutual dependence of 6.5 billion people in a single global economy and system of states.
Joschka Fischer, Germany’s Foreign Minister and Vice Chancellor from 1998 to 2005, led Germany’s Green Party for nearly 20 years. This commentary is published by DAILY NEWS EGYPT in collaboration with Project Syndicate/Institute for Human Sciences (www.project-syndicate.org).
