The dark side of human rights

By Panagiotis Kondylis

We are living through times characterised by the increasing fragmentation of thought, the predominance of incoherence and the almost complete disappearance of public debate – understood here as the opposite of privation rather than the liberal phantasy of a ‘marketplace of ideas’. Needless to say that such an impoverishment is almost irredeemably worsened by the proliferation of social media and the specific rules of conduct embedded in their structural set up. From this perspective, the work of Panagiotis Kondylis (1943-1998), a thinker and philosopher with undeniable conservative leanings, continues to contain an admirable clarity of thought that is worth engaging with. I therefore decided to re-work a rather poor online translation of some excerpts from his book ‘Planetary politics after the Cold War’ (a collection of essays published in the early 1990s) as an interesting intervention and food for thought and not – as I feel obliged to clarify – as an endorsement. Whether the analysis and descriptions that Kondylis puts forward in these passages represent a normative defence of state sovereignty or tend to depict certain subjects in ways that should (hopefully) be unacceptable today, remains secondary. For his account continues to realistically describe what the concept of human rights inevitably entails, highlighting the inherent contradictions visible whenever nation-states pretend to uphold and defend them.  

[Green Muse, Albert Maignan 1895']

Talk of human rights has moved into the centre of the political vocabulary during recent decades. An optimistic observer could draw the conclusion that politics has now, after the bitter experiences of the last century, set itself the task of moulding the world in accordance with ethical principles. However, as is often the case in the historical past, in combining the ethical with the political, the ethical was subjugated to the logic of the political - in addition, the reasons for the mobilisation of the ethical itself were primarily political. That the situation was not essentially different in the recent past entitles us to underline certain political aspects and implications that stem from the examination of the problems of human rights.

[...]

We must emphatically warn against the illusion that the face value of ideas can prevent their polemical instrumentalization. Were it so, wars would never have taken place between nations which all sincerely declared support for the religion of love.

The possibility of the transformation of human rights into a new field of tension is connected to an elementary fact which is hardly perceived as all sides identify their own goals with the goals of humanity as a whole. It is a matter of fact that in the contemporary constitution of world society there can be no talk of human rights stricto sensu. We do not refer here to "human rights violations" in many countries, but to the very essence of the thing. Human rights, i.e. rights which humans possess because of their mere quality as humans, can only then have real meaning and existence if all humans can enjoy them without restriction everywhere on earth and, in fact, in the place of their own choice, by virtue of their naked humanness and irrespective of their origin or other preconditions. As long as this does not happen, i.e. as long as a Chinese person does not have the same rights in the United States as an American and an Albanian does not have the same rights in Italy as an Italian, one may, if one does not want to distort the meaning of words, only talk of political (or civil) rights, but not of human rights. What today is euphemistically called “human rights” is always granted by a state-organised political unit towards those who are its citizens, and the validity of that which such a political unit grants, can only be guaranteed inside of each respective (state) territory.

No state can therefore guarantee that those rights which are regarded as human rights par excellence, as for instance the right to bodily integrity and freedom of speech, can be enjoyed outside of its borders. And conversely: no state can, without dissolving itself, grant to all humans without exception certain rights, which are generally regarded as political (or civil) rights, as for instance the right to vote and the right of permanent residence. In other words: not all humans can, qua humans, possess all rights (no matter whether these are called human or civil rights in the prevalent terminology) regardless of where they find themselves.

Rights, which are given and guaranteed by a state and are in force to the extent that (sovereign) statehood exists, can only be described as human rights if the attribute human is exclusively allocated by said state to its own citizens. But even if a state did this, it still could not guarantee that its citizens would be recognised as having equal rights and as possessors of universal human rights by other sovereign states. Human rights as human rights can only be granted if humanity is constituted as a coordinated and unified political subject. Only the end of sovereign statehood in all of its contemporary forms could inaugurate the age of real human rights.

Human rights universalism was launched by the rich countries of the West and was first politically instrumentalised by them. However, it is increasingly positively received and advocated by the poorer countries of the East and of the South which, understandably, see in it a welcome means to promote their claims in relation to the distribution of the world's wealth and the world's resources. They are, however, faced with a dilemma, because they are not in a position, nolentes or volentes, to fully apply domestically the very principles whose implementation at an international level is expected to bring about a noticeable improvement in their position as nations and states.

[...]

Either way, the West will come under a moral and political pressure which it cannot easily evade. Whoever wants to explain the debacle of actually existing socialism with reference to the fact that it could not materialize its eschatological or direct material promises, must also seriously consider the possibility that the nation states which want to follow the path of the West but cannot go down that path will, in their disappointment, eventually turn against the West and its universalistic ethics. Because the poorer countries will be willing to interpret this failure as the well-fed and egotistical West’s betrayal of its own ethical principles. In the expectations which the West has awoken through the world export of its ethical universalism, an explosive potential is latent. For the victory of its ideas has not relieved the West, but on the contrary burdened it with tasks and a burden of guilt whose pressure that can change it fundamentally.

This pressure will necessarily increase to the extent that universal human rights will be interpreted materially, leading to a repetition of what happened for the first time in the 19^th century, when socialists demanded the material interpretation and realisation of the formal freedoms and rights propagated by the bourgeoisie. Despite what ‘progressive’ theologians say, the Christian perception of human dignity was never originally linked to a notion of a minimum material level of existence. In the contemporary predicament, however, a minimum level of human dignity and a minimum level of consumption are tied together; whoever goes hungry is a human without substantial rights, not someone whom god-willed material deprivation allows to proclaim indifference towards material goods.

A material interpretation of human rights and their connection with a level of consumption generates a conflict with the existing shortage at the global level, which means that they are transformed into weapons within a struggle over the distribution of scarce goods. Whoever belongs to a rich nation while defending the strict observance of human rights will have to share their human rights with others, unknown to them, humans, and from that fairly certainly a confrontation will follow during which one’s human rights will stand opposed to that of another.

In any case, it must be regarded as certain that the more people invoke human rights, the more extensive their interpretation will become. This means, in other words, that more people will demand more material and non-material goods, with the conviction that these belong to them. In light of this observation, which can hardly be refuted, one must prepare for the fact that the function and meaning of human rights will change in the future. To the extent that human rights are interpreted materially, they cannot mean the same thing irrespective of whether they are claimed, simultaneously and consistently, by two, five or ten billion people.

What can be said in terms of future conflicts and as a pre-emptive attempt to maintain a safety valve, however, is that universalist ethics and human rights continue to depend on the presupposition of state sovereignty. Even states that fully recognise human rights and guarantee them within their own territory, reserve the right to deny them to non-citizens. Ancient democracies already maintained a sharp dividing line between their own citizens and foreigners. The proclamation of human rights is therefore connected today – and will be in the future even more connected – with the bluntly expressed wish that our fellow humans should kindly remain in their country of origin and enjoy their human dignity there.

An unrestricted enforcement of human rights, i.e. a consistent and legally safeguarded reduction of humans to their naked humanness, without any consideration for nationality or citizenship, would automatically entail the abolition of sovereign statehood and of all related to the freedom of movement and that of permanent residence – a nightmarish vision for Europeans and North Americans. It is indicative that the champions of universal ethics, who appear extremely imaginative when concerned with declarations of principles and practically non-binding theoretical hair-splitting, have so far remained silent about the concrete consequences of a consistent enforcement of human rights (i.e. of the rights of humans as humans) at the planetary level.

Since the West can only implement human rights under the presupposition of state sovereignty, it becomes entangled in a contradiction which, understandably, seems even more pronounced and unbearable to those who knock on its door. It is a contradiction that would deepen even more should the West be tempted to impose human rights (that is to say: rights which apply to the citizens of the West) through political or even military interventions in other parts of the world. For such interventions would, out of necessity, occur selectively (a campaign against China e.g. would be inconceivable), which quickly renders them unreliable; it must even be expected that fanaticised masses in countries like e.g. Iran would launch the motto slogan “Down with human rights!” in exactly the same way that Spanish combatants facing the firing squad shouted at Napoleon “Down with freedom!”. Over and above that, it remains in the long run impossible to violate the state sovereignty of others in the name of human rights, while fencing one’s own state sovereignty against what others hold to be their human rights.

[...]

There is also a still deeper reason why tensions in the human universe will accelerate – not despite but because of the spread of universal-ethical principles. The ethically-normatively charged word “human” had a linguistic function as an honorific adjective so long as one demarcated it against other adjectives which appeared to indicate historically specific distinctions between humans that could be abolished; in the language of ethical universalism “human” has always meant something nobler and of higher value than words like Jew or Greek, Christian or heathen, black or white, communist or liberal. If however all particular concepts which have at times been counterposed against the universal concept of “human”, the concept will no longer constitute an adjective, that is, it will no longer point to a higher quality, but it will be converted into a noun for the description of a certain animal species. Humans will in their entirety be called “humans” just as lions are called lions and mice – mice, without further national or ideological differentiation. It may sound paradoxical and yet it is so, that humans have differentiated themselves from all the other animal species exactly because they were not just humans free of all other attributes or predicates. Not only did culture emerge through the overcoming of bare humanness and the gradual embrace of historically specific attributes, but altercations and struggles between humans gained, due to the presence and the effect of exactly these attributes, emotional and ideological dimensions which went far beyond animal existence. That is why it is not out of the question that reducing humans to their mere humanness will inaugurate and accompany an era in which humans will have to fight against each other for goods which are absolutely necessary for the naked survival of the “human” animal species – such as struggles for air and water. In accordance with a well-known paradox of the historical action of humans, the imposition of universal ethics will thus bring forward consequences entirely antithetical to the originally intended ones.

It is perhaps superfluous to clarify that these thoughts do not indicate that human rights universalism is to be held responsible for all bad things that happen or that the adoption of ethical relativism is the appropriate solution for the great aporias of our planetary history. Things take their course, and this course is determined by ideas – in the sense of independent forces that intervene externally into a process of becoming and are therefore able to direct this becoming – even though at a far lesser degree than what the producers and consumers of ideas believe or want to make others believe. Nevertheless the prevalence of human rights universalism that is underway remains symptomatic of key political developments - and it remains better to think about them than not to.