How 20th-century debates reveal enduring tensions at the core of the human rights project.
In 1947 and 1948, the bold and controversial first Director-General of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), Julian Huxley, together with Jacques Havet, the young first head of UNESCO’s philosophy sub-section, took steps that were intended to shape the conceptual framework of what became the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), which was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on December 10, 1948. During these years, UNESCO put in motion an extraordinary process that was meant to reveal a cross-cultural consensus on the basic philosophical and ethical principles upon which a new global social contract should be based. This process—which involved soliciting opinions on the question of human rights by notables such as T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, and Gandhi—took place independently of the much more public one that unfolded somewhat later under the auspices of the UN’s Commission on Human Rights (CHR), which was chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt.
UNESCO put in motion an extraordinary process that was meant to reveal a cross-cultural consensus on the basic philosophical and ethical principles upon which a new global social contract should be based.
The work of UNESCO on human rights during this period, the debates surrounding its conflicts with the CHR, the specific results of the cross-cultural survey it undertook, and the broader implications of this survey for the meanings and legitimacy of human rights, were all lost to a history that was dominated by the geopolitical logics of the Cold War. Nevertheless, new research has revisited the UNESCO human rights survey in light of ongoing debates over what a recent volume by Hopgood, Snyder, and Vinjamuri has described as “human rights futures”: the possibilities for and limitations to human rights among the contemporary disorder and violence that Samuel Moyn calls the “neoliberal maelstrom.”
Plumbing the correspondence between Huxley and Havet and their nearly sixty respondents reveals the richness, complexity, and ultimate ambiguity in the UNESCO human rights survey and reinforces the importance of understanding it—and the history of human rights more generally—through what the British art historian Michael Baxandall called a “period eye.” Baxandall argued that one must develop the capacity for comprehending paintings and other forms of art by learning how they would have been perceived and appreciated in their own terms and times. The reason for adopting a “period eye” was to avoid imposing later—often much later—standards and expectations on works of art that were created against the backdrop of very different aesthetic, cultural, and historical conditions.
Working through the primary sources around the UNESCO survey, what was so striking is the extent to which the proposition for a new “declaration of the rights of man” was regarded with skepticism, confusion, even incredulity. While important actors and institutions were certainly committed to liberal human rights as the primary legal, political, and moral response to the horrors of the Holocaust and world war, many others, particularly those on the left, viewed human rights as a framework firmly rooted in the late-eighteenth century and therefore long-since obsolete. As Morris L. Ernst, co-founder of the American Civil Liberties Union, put it in his refusal to formally respond to the UNESCO survey, “It seems to me that we are finished with the era of passing general resolutions in regard to liberty and freedom.”
The period during which the UNESCO survey was undertaken, early-1947 to late-1948, was a time in which many proposals for the postwar order were being developed. These proposals were influenced by a range of currents and ideologies, not all of which were complementary. The discussions around human rights at the time took place within a swirl of debate and contention that involved widespread support for Soviet and socialist projects; a belief in the progressive aspects and dominance of technology; and the often conservative retreat into the certainties of religious faith and institutions. It is important to understand this liminal postwar, but pre-UDHR, period as one in which the idea of human rights was associated by its critics with a small cluster of Western national traditions (notably the American and French); viewed as the unmistakable normative underpinning of capitalism; and held in a certain disdain by many intellectuals, who regarded the “rights of man”—much as Jeremy Bentham had 150 years before—as pernicious, since their metaphysical abstractness seduced people into ignoring other, more concrete, approaches to solving social and economic problems.
The period during which the UNESCO survey was undertaken was a time in which many proposals for the postwar order were being developed.
In thinking of this relatively short period of about two years as a prehistory, it is not my intention to assign undue importance to the ratification of the UDHR in the broader historiography of human rights. Rather, it is to underscore the fact that at the time, at least for certain key actors and institutions in Europe and the United States, these months in which a declaration of human rights was being developed were seen as an important moment in the wider economic, political, and legal reconstruction of a fractured world.
Yet developing a period eye is not only necessary for gaining a fresh perspective on this critical moment when the UNESCO human rights survey took place. It is also necessary in order to better appreciate how and why the UNESCO survey was interpreted by scholars in particular ways decades later. When the UNESCO survey was rediscovered by a small group of historians of human rights in the late-1990s, the background geopolitical, ideological, and cultural conditions had changed dramatically. With human rights under increasing pressure from Asian intellectuals and politicians and postcolonial critics, among others, the findings of the UNESCO survey seemed to provide a conclusive rebuttal to charges that the expanding post-Cold War human rights movement was based on Western norms. Nevertheless, these debates at the end of the first decade of the post-Cold War took place within a broader historical moment of optimism that UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan had designated as “the age of human rights.”
From the perspective of 2018, however, the years of the “age of human rights” seem increasingly distant. Instead, we confront a period characterized by a widespread backlash against human rights; a time in which the rise and fall of human rights has led to disenchantment and even hopelessness; and the realization that we are living during an extended and uncertain transition away from the high point of post-Cold War cosmopolitanism.
We confront a period characterized by a widespread backlash against human rights.
Thus, it is with a sense of some urgency that research on the UNESCO human rights survey, despite its idiosyncrasy, appears at this moment of crisis in the broader history of human rights. What, we might ask, is the precise nature of what some have described as the “structural defects” at the core of the human rights project? If they are indeed structural, this would imply that the problem—now and in the future—is not merely political: the failure of implementation, bad faith on the part of bad state actors, institutional complexity, tensions between state sovereignty and international law, the obstructing hand of global capitalism, and so on.
Rather, if countless contemporary critics are right, the problems must be more basic, they must relate to how human rights are understood both conceptually and historically. In this sense, then, the results of the UNESCO survey offer us the ability to rewind the history of human rights back to an important moment when the basic concepts were still very much in flux and the first lines of the postwar story of human rights had not been written. Perhaps the rudiments of an alternative model of human rights are to be found among the diverse responses to the UNESCO survey and the surrounding debates, discussions, and various expressions of dissent.
This post has been adapted from Letters to the Contrary: A Curated History of the UNESCO Human Rights Survey edited by Mark Goodale.
Dr. Mark Goodale is genius unveiled for both anthropology and for human rights. His work and its message serves as model for how we as a species can better look in the mirror.
Posted by: Jebb Dykstra | May 12, 2018 at 07:53 AM