Human Rights Without Illusions

Escaping the Moral Trap of Universalism

Aaron Rhodes

• Publisher: Academica Press
• Year: 2025
• Print ISBN: 9781680533514
• eBook ISBN: 9781680533521
• Edition: 0
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Human Rights
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In Human Rights Without Illusions, leading human rights advocate Aaron Rhodes traces the political and religious traditions that have led to prioritizing consensus among diverse nations as a prerequisite for upholding universal principles. The modern, global human rights regime sits on the foundation of Hellenistic stoicism and medieval Christendom, where natural law morally unified all of humanity. Drawing upon subsequent efforts to implement a secularized law of nations as promulgated natural law, and inspired by political progressivism, the international human rights system initiated in 1948 envisions a process of moral transformation on the basis of bureaucratic cooperation with institutions of the United Nations. By contrast, the natural rights tradition reflects a different form of universalism, one that focuses on a common understanding of human nature rather than intergovernmental consensus. The philosophy of natural rights, as crystallized in the Enlightenment, is skeptical of international formations, holding that interactions between governments occur in a state of nature without any overarching authority. Therefore, protecting human rights is possible only in nation-states, where the rules of civil society are legally enforceable. That does not render futile a campaign for improving respect for human rights around the world, however. Rhodes considers defending human rights and freedoms to be a moral duty, but human rights advocacy needs to free itself from the inevitable corruption of institutionalized universalism. Rhodes argues instead for a “human rights without illusions” consistent with the classical liberal principles that inspired America’s Founding Fathers and shaped their belief that basic freedoms are realized in a bottom-up process, not a top-down one. Progress toward a spontaneous order of global human rights can be made if liberal societies project inherent freedom as a compelling moral principle, rather than subjecting it to legalistic rationalization and compromise in inclusive global institutions.

Table of contents

• Human Rights Without Illusions
• Escaping the Moral Trap of Universalism
• Aaron Rhodes
• Human Rights Without Illusions
• Escaping the Moral Trap of Universalism
• Aaron Rhodes
• Academica PressWashington
• Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data 
• Names: Rhodes, Aaron (author)
• Title: Human rights without illusions : escaping the moral trap of universalism | Rhodes, Aaron.
• Description: Washington : Academica Press, 2025.
• Identifiers: LCCN 2025943362 | ISBN 9781680533514 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781680533521 (ebook)
• Copyright 2025 Aaron Rhodes
• Dedication
• This book is dedicated to Sara Silverman Rhodes (1947-2001); may her memory be a blessing.
• Acknowledgements
• I am grateful to all who have offered encouragement and support in writing this book, and especially to Murray Bessette, Jim Keenan, Mary Kissel, Cornelia Klinger, Diana Moldoveanu, Scott Newman, Juliana Pilon, Roger Pilon, Daniel Rhodes, Lorna Rhodes, Nathan Rhodes, David Rose, Ilya Shapiro, Marion Smith, Barry Spergel, Peter Wood, and Peter Zoehrer.
• A portion of my research was made possible by a grant from the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars. Parts of the ook were drafted while I was a Senior Fellow in the Common Sense Society.
• The manuscript was edited by Carol Staswick, and I thank her for clarifying its language and ideas. I am also grateful to Paul du Quenoy for his interest and support, and his colleagues at Academica Press.
• Finally, I wish to acknowledge the moral and intellectual support of my wife, Anna Sunder-Plassmann, and her contributions to our family during my years of work on the book.
• Contents
• Acknowledgements ix
• Introduction 1
• Chapter 1Ancient Roots of Institutionalized Universalism 13
• Chapter 2Universalism and Christendom 37
• Chapter 3Universal Natural Rights and Sovereign Particularity 65
• Chapter 4Toward the Institutionalization of Universal Human Rights 89
• Chapter 5The Universal Declaration of Human Rights as Incarnation of Natural Law 113
• Chapter 6Institutionalized Universalism vs. Natural Rights 141
• Chapter 7Toward a Spontaneous Order of Human Rights 181
• Index 205
• Introduction
• The international human rights system is dysfunctional, and unworthy of participation by liberal societies that seek to suppor aspirations for freedom among people living under oppressive regimes. Inaugurated with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, the system is founded on a vision of an emerging, morally unified international community, drawing from religious a d political traditions that go back more than two millennia. It was meant to constrain the power of states on behalf of the individual’s inherent right to freedom, but the ideal of universal, natural rights has fallen victim to an institutional universality that perpetuates illusions about how unfree societies are liberalized. As a consequence, history’s most liberating political ideal has morphed into a tool of repression.
• The United Nations Charter of 1945 committed its signatories to “cooperate” in the defense of human rights. The Universal Declaration added particulars about the rights to be protected, and institutions were founded to uphold those rights. But the promise of global liberalization has not been fulfilled in the subsequent decades. According to research by the Cato Institute, a gradual decline in human freedom since 2007 led up to a sharp decrease from 2019 to 2020, when “94.3 percent of the world’s population saw a fall in human freedom,” with 148 jurisdictions backsliding while only 16 showed improvement. Cato’s Human Freedom Index for 2024 showed that only 14 percent of the world’s population lived in the top quartile of societies in terms of freedom. A survey by the Economist in 2020 found that only 8.4 percent of the world’s population lived in a full democracy. Freedom House determined that the people of only 9 in 54 African countries (17 percent) had political freedom in 2023.
• The international human rights system is not transforming societies for the better. Instead, the enemies of freedom are manipulating it to their own benefit, as UN human rights institutions have come under the control of the very societies they were meant to reform. Today, 70 percent of the members of the UN Human Rights Council are ruled by tyrannical or authoritarian regimes that reject the fundamental premise of universal, natural rights. They pervert the very meaning of human rights to legitimate their repressive policies and exploit human rights institutions to defend their abuses of power.
• As more societies fall under some form of despotism and billions of people suffer because of it, international human rights law and institutions are paralyzed by deep moral divisions. Human rights multilateralism, now taken almost as religious dogma, gives cover to repressive regimes by thwarting any meaningful bilateral and civil society response to abuses. What is more, the multilateral human rights process has been invaded by an ideology of coercive, transnational progressivism that promotes global bureaucratic regulation of speech and of moral choices informed by religious traditions. At the same time, the system turns movements for political freedom into ritualistic advocacy in unaccountable transnational institutions.
• When I was working in international human rights in the 1990s, during the high age of liberal internationalism, I felt a growi g ambivalence about the bureaucratic institutionalization of human rights and about how intergovernmental institutions promote moral equivalence and political subversion more generally. I began to perceive that the charismatic idea of human rights had been desiccated by legal rationalization. Liberal governments and the international human rights community have largely failed to acknowledge the degree to which multilateral human rights institutions are malfunctioning. Some observers do recognize the dysfunction, but few seem to understand the reasons for it.
• If we want to find a better way to promote and protect human rights, we first need to understand the assumptions behind the present system and identify their weaknesses. Why do governments and civil society attach moral charisma to international institutions? Why do liberal-democratic governments feel morally compelled to cooperate with dictatorships in international human rights institutions? Why does the legitimacy of human rights standards depend on a universal political consensus including states that deny basic rights to their citizens? How can supposedly rational actors accept the manifest absurdity of subjecting judgments about human rights to a vote in international bodies that are dominated by unfree states?
• This book traces the political-philosophical roots of the international human rights system from antiquity into the modern era. The source of the system’s dysfunction can be found in the very principle at the heart of human rights—the principle of universality, which has given rise to geopolitical forms of universalism that undermine it in practice. This syndrome manifests the paradox inherent in the long Western tradition of universalism. But history also reveals a different tradition of universality that lies beneath the principle of natural rights and supports a better way to defend freedom.
• Human rights mean nothing if these rights are not understood as inherent to all humans, and thus universal. The objective universality of natural law, reason, ethics—and of human nature itself—is perhaps the most consequential idea in history, the foundation of efforts to cultivate personal virtue in humane societies that respect the right to freedom. Moral universality is argualy the central principle of Western civilization. Truth itself is universal by definition. Nature is universal; it has no boundaries. Reason is universal and objective; the capacity to exercise reason is common to people everywhere on earth, though it is not always evident. Ethics is unitary. There is no ethics of biology, no special “business ethics,” and so on; there is simply ethics. Justice means that the same law applies equally to all people, everywhere.
• The West, the birthplace of human rights, is a monotheistic civilization: there is one God, and God is one. As we are all subjects of the one God, or Nature, we are all morally equal, and we owe to one another the respect due to an equal. In our biblical tradition, we are all kin, with no natural hierarchies among us. Ethical monotheism morally unites all of mankind, undercutting national and ethnic distinctions, while establishing clear moral distinctions based on inviolable principles. How to honor these principles, both domestically and beyond national borders, is a political and policy dilemma, given the inherent paradox of universality.
• Since antiquity, the concept of universality has generated visions of a unified humanity living in harmony with divine or natu al law. “From the Greeks and the Hebrews to the Christian Middle Ages to the Renaissance and the Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, unity was the great virtue,” wrote Isaiah Berlin. “Truth is one, many is error.” The unity of mankind in classical Greek philosophy was a moral unity based on natural law and a shared capacity for reason. The laws of the state should conform to the universal, transcendent laws of nature. As Greek civilization expanded from an assortment of independent city-states into a multicultural empire, Stoic philosophers imagined the moral unity of mankind taking a political form, with natural law materializing as a law of nations.
• Over the centuries, Western civilization has seen various efforts to construct overarching authorities that could achieve unity among peoples on the basis of universals. The principle of universality has been used as a justification for erasing borders and instituting global governance, a perennial fantasy. Writing in Time magazine in 1992, Strobe Talbot predicted that nationhood would become obsolete in the twenty-first century. “All states,” he said, “will recognize a single, global authority.” Unity is associated with peace, but some of the most egregious atrocities in history have been committed in efforts to bring humanity together in harmony with nature, aiming at perfection. As Juliana Pilon has documented, utopias are toxic and inherently threatening to freedom.
• Yet the concept of human rights itself hinges on their universality—they are the rights of all humans, everywhere. By logic, the idea of universal human rights has led to the creation of transnational institutions and legal regimes that prioritize inclusiveness. Pioneers of the international human rights system believed that its concepts and processes needed to be culturally and politically inclusive if they were to be respected as universal. The institutions formed to promote and protect human rights have sought participation by all of the world’s diverse societies, representing the whole of humanity, whether or not their gover ments respect natural rights.
• Global institutions would become the arbiters of the meaning and application of universal human rights, the meaning of liberty and human dignity. The international human rights system seeks to confirm its own legitimacy as custodian of the ideal of universal human rights by its comprehensive inclusivity. Yet its structural universality masks deep moral contradictions with a veneer of malleable abstractions.
• The universality of human rights has come to be seen as inseparable from global consensus. Today it is virtually impossible to conceive of promoting universal human rights outside of international legal standards and bureaucratic processes. Moral universality has been displaced by political universalism, by utopian visions of a harmoniously unified world. This ideal depends on emptying the moral categories that enable us to distinguish our understanding of human nature and its associated political principles from the diametrically opposed views that characterize tyrannies. It requires allowing a tradition of individual freedom to be absorbed into an inclusive universalism in which we address the world with an equivocating language of consensus and accommodation.
• Western societies, where political freedom was first defined and honored, outsourced the moral authority of human rights to an amoral, bureaucratic zone of global legal and power politics. As a result, human rights have become an instrument for achieving the West’s moral disarmament. We have lost the ability to say what human rights are, beyond referring to international law. We have lost the sense of human rights as being rooted in universal natural law. We have lost the capacity to judge whether a society is free or not. Instead, we are ready to condition the enjoyment of individual freedom and moral choice on cultural, social and historical factors, so as to accommodate the demands of the “international community.”
• There are two aspects to the problem of international human rights today. One is the definition of rights, and more specifically, of human rights. The other is the long-running quest to bring the world’s diverse societies together under universal moral standards and laws. The capacious concept of human rights in current discourse developed from the narrow but rational Enlightenment principle of the inherent, natural rights of individuals to freedom and moral choice. In The Debasement of Human Rights (208), I documented how the international community had embraced a definition of human rights that weakens fundamental, individual rights to freedom by mingling them with collective “economic and social rights,” in order to give socialist and authoritarian regimes a place at the human rights table.
• The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, with its mix of individual and collective rights, was intended to forge global unity both morally and politically. This purpose followed in a tradition of universalism that originated in Greek antiquity and still shapes our thinking about international society. Classical Greek philosophers described a moral universalism, which later assumed institutional, intersocietal forms in the Hellenistic Empire and then the sprawling empire amassed by the Romans. A new cosmopolitanism created tensions between the moral demands of universal nature and the conventions of particular communities. The Jewish tradition and Christian prophecy warned that attempts to unify all of humanity were hubristic and destructive.
• The moral template of the modern international human rights system originated in medieval Christendom, which first developed within the shell of the decaying Roman Empire and then spread beyond it, bringing a multitude of diverse kingdoms under a single sacred authority that sought to establish unity and peace. Since Christ was a God for all, Christendom was imagined as a moral system for the entire world. But Christianity’s transnational ambitions led to a bureaucratic Church and the corruption of its moral core—a dynamic that would be echoed in the international human rights regime.
• The idea of individual, natural rights—the heart of human rights—was primarily clarified by the Enlightenment philosophers Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, who thought of natural law not as a set of sacred demands, but as a product of universal reason. Neither Hobbes not Locke saw the defense of natural rights as the responsibility of any intergovernmental authority; the laws of na ion-states based on consent could protect natural rights. International relations necessarily remained in a state of nature without any transcendent, coercive authority. But Locke believed in an obligation of civil governments to punish other governments that violated natural law.
• The core idea of individual, natural rights thus grew from classical liberalism, an intellectual creed that is skeptical of in ernational institutions built on abstractions and detached from national traditions as custodians of moral obligations. The United States of America was founded on the principle of individual rights, which “subordinated society to moral law,” as Ayn Rand observed. Because America’s human rights creed drew on the tradition of British common law as well as a branch of Enlightenment philosophy, its foundation combined national tradition with universalist ideals. Early America’s most influential leaders encouraged people of other lands still under the thumb of monarchy to rise up and claim their universal, natural rights, but the Founders’ sense of mission was tempered by Montesquieu’s prudential understanding that altering a political regime depends on changes in a society’s political culture.
• Modern international human rights institutions are based on another form of universalism, one that emphasizes legal uniformity via top-down commands. This vein of universalism runs through the thinking of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and, to a lesser extent, that of Immanuel Kant; the French Revolution, with its statist approach to enforcing equality; and the progressive movement that emerged in the late nineteenth century. These influences fed into the development of transnational institutions and aspirations for world government.
• Interest in global governance has typically spiked in the wake of war and the collapse of existing intersocietal orders. The f agmentation of Christendom amid brutal religious conflict in the seventeenth century prompted Hugo Grotius to elaborate his theory of secular international law as a means to humanize warfare and moralize relations between nation-states. The Congress of Vienna was formed to bring order to Europe at the end of the Napoleonic Wars. President Woodrow Wilson proposed the League of Nations as a way of keeping peace after the terrible carnage of World War I. The United Nations, a reincarnation of the League of Nations, was motivated by the desire for peace and stability after a second global war that shocked world leaders and civil society with its devastation and genocide.
• The organizational core of the United Nations consisted of the General Assembly and the Security Council, both conflict preven ion mechanisms that do not seek to alter or engage with the political cultures of member states. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was meant to reflect all of the world’s various moral traditions, and thus it includes economic and social rights that justify more state power over the individual. The Universal Declaration, according to Mary Ann Glendon, forever altered “the moral terrain of international relations” and became “a pillar of a new international system.” It has been the moral clothing of liberal internationalism, and also a source of encouragement to those who believe that more international laws, regulations, and institutions are essential to human progress and to redeeming the sins of nation-states. Human rights thus became the invul erable philosophical shock troops for globalist unification.
• As the institutional and legal dimensions of human rights have grown, the concept of human rights has withered. Technocratic rationalization in global institutions has sapped its moral force, in the same way that a bureaucratic Church with a universalizing mission diluted the spirit that moved the Apostles of Christ. Human rights institutions, with their emphasis on universal pa ticipation, have superseded the core principle of natural rights. Too often, the international human rights system is an obstacle to political change in the direction of liberty.
• For fourteen years (1993–2007), I was executive director of the International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights (IHF), a ongovernmental organization established in 1982 to harmonize the work of the various Helsinki Committees, both behind the Iron Curtain and in the West. These committees had sprung up in many European countries to defend human rights after the signing of he Helsinki Accords (1975). I started to visit the UN Human Rights Commission, in Geneva, in 1995. At times, it felt like the center of the moral universe, but its activities began to strike me as a charade. Other work took me and my IHF colleagues to the capitals of countries like Kyrgyzstan, Georgia, Belarus and Russia, where we joined local activists in speaking directly with officials about human rights abuses and gave press conferences. Sometimes we traveled to remote cities and towns to interview victims of repression and speak with local officials. Over the years, I became more and more uncomfortable taking part in intergovernmental human rights meetings and advocacy. Whenever I was in Geneva, I felt an inchoate longing to work for human rights i a local setting. The struggle for human rights, I realized, was a task for citizens in relation to their own state authorities.
• The Human Rights Commission, which would later be replaced by the Human Rights Council, was a platform for governments to engage in legal politics in the idioms of human rights. What happened there was mostly political posturing, with little bearing on the struggle for freedom by women and men living under autocratic regimes. Most human rights advocates deferred to international officials and seemed to revere institutions more than liberty; many wanted to be such officials themselves. I slowly came to understand that the human rights campaign had been subsumed by intergovernmental institutions. Its efforts were poured into a region of largely symbolic activity, rather than into the politics of states, where they would matter.
• The proceedings of international human rights institutions reminded me of passages from The Waning of the Middle Ages by Johan Huizinga. We were witnessing “an epoch of fading and decay,” a culture at its limits. Human rights proponents had run out of spirit; their gestures were hollow and exaggerated. Blatant hypocrisy was accepted as normal. Human rights multilateralism had lost its sheen, as the truth about its moral corruption burned through layers of conformist defenses in academic, media and diplomatic discourse.
• International human rights institutions have become worse than simply inefficient due to the weaknesses of international law a d the noncompliant “bad actors” in the system. They also suffer from moral differences among the member nations. “Enfeebled UN fights for relevance in divided world,” said a headline in the Financial Times in 2023. The article quoted Matthew Kroenig of the Atlantic Council on the price of global inclusivity: “International bodies composed of like-minded powers, such as NATO and the G7, function because they bring together states with common interests to solve problems.” By contrast, more inclusive bodies such as the United Nations, encompassing an array of adversarial powers, “aren’t working.” The international human rights system has been corrupted by the paradox of institutionalized universalism. Formally unified but morally divided, it is being exploi ed by unfree states that do not support the foundational purpose of defending the natural rights of individuals.
• While many observers know this to be true, there is little indication of any serious thought being given to the future of huma rights. We must not evade this challenge. As Orlando Patterson remarked, “the valorization of personal liberty is the noblest achievement of Western civilization.” With liberty in retreat around the world, there is an urgent need to devise intellectually and morally coherent alternatives to the current human rights system.
• Parts of the system have been beneficial, such as allowing the exposure of abuses in international forums. But in most respects, the system is not working as it ought to. Free and democratic states must emancipate themselves from illusions about it—the illusion that universal, individual human rights are best protected by multilateral institutions, and that a Fabian process of p ogressive human rights reform on the basis of international standards and law will liberate citizens from authoritarian oppression. The human rights campaign should be deglobalized.
• Universal rights are most effectively protected where constitutional governance puts a check on the power of rulers and prohibits laws that encroach upon individual freedom. Liberal democracies need to promote human rights abroad as America’s founding leaders did: by inspiring people of other nations to challenge their own oppressive governments. The world changes for the better only from the ground up. The best prospect for human rights in the future lies in the upholding of constitutional rights in sovereign, liberal states, to serve as a model for all who seek the blessings of liberty.
• Chapter 1 Ancient Roots of Institutionalized Universalism
• “I am a citizen of the world,” a kosmopolites, said Diogenes the Cynic when asked where he came from. Diogenes died in 323 BC, but his answer is still echoed more than two thousand years later in discourse about national identity and sovereignty, the moral obligations of states, and concepts of natural law and their bearing on international order. In modern times, it resurfaced perhaps most consequentially in President Woodrow Wilson’s 1917 inaugural address when he informed Americans that they were “provincials no longer,” but rather “citizens of the world.” The term encapsulates the idea that all states should be accountable to universal standards of conduct toward their own citizens, upheld by international law and institutions. This is the moral and political perspective that defines international human rights in the modern world—and also the source of that system’s dysfunction.
• Diogenes was a grandfather of Stoicism, the philosophical school whose central message was the virtue of living in harmony with nature. Stoics cultivated and popularized the idea that man’s nature is universal, which is the basis for the concept of a universally applicable moral law. But the intrinsic contradictions of universalism were apparent in Stoic philosophy from the begi ning, and those contradictions continue to present a challenge to the project of promoting freedom and justice around the world. The paradoxes of universalism that plague international human rights institutions today go back to the roots of Western civilization in the rocky earth of ancient Greece.
• For those who came of age in the liberal West in the 1960s and ’70s, Diogenes is a familiar type. He lived a life of voluntary, ostentatious poverty and simplicity, as a rebel against the establishment, professing disdain for local polities. Like hippies acting out during our Age of Aquarius, he confronted people on the streets as he claimed to be searching for an honest man. His vagabond lifestyle—sleeping in a large ceramic jar and masturbating in public—was a visible rejection of society’s conventions and hypocrisies. Indeed, the Cynic school took its name from the Greek word meaning “doglike.”
• Diogenes raged against the leading philosophical authorities and disrupted lectures with rude antics. His most famous stunt was insulting Alexander the Great, ruler of the known world. Plutarch writes that Alexander asked to be introduced to the eccentric philosopher he had been hearing so much about. “And when the monarch addressed him with greetings, and asked if he wanted any hing, Diogenes answered, ‘Yes, stand a little out of my sun.’” Diogenes may have wanted the warmth of sunlight, but the incident symbolizes how the very existence of a ruler of all Greeks—and all known nations beyond—was blocking the light of nature, sta ding between man and the nurturing cosmos. Fortunately, Alexander laughed it off and even expressed envy of Diogenes’ detachment, with its power to undermine the ruler’s belief in his own authority.
• Born in the colony of Sinope, on the Black Sea coast of present-day Turkey, Diogenes was the son of a man who minted coins for a living. Manifesting what was evidently an Oedipal criminality, Diogenes himself was banished from the community on charges of debasing currency—lowering its real value by reducing the amount of precious metal in coins. Indeed, didn’t he do the same to he idea of citizenship later in life when he claimed to be a “citizen of the world”?
• World citizenship suggests a diluted currency, a thin abstraction carrying no enforceable rights or duties. Today the concept is commonly called “globalism,” a neologism coined in 2001 by John Fonte of the Hudson Institute, who meant it as a pejorative. But millions use the word to convey their understanding of the world as an interdependent and interconnected system, their “pos national” embrace of “universal values,” and their faith in the legitimacy and efficacy of international institutions in defending those values and promoting common goals. Some influential members of the academic-political establishment even advocate ver ical rule by a “supranational” administrative state that could “pierce the shell of state sovereignty.”
• This viewpoint can be traced back to the Cynic philosophers, with their low regard for the family, the state, the idea of nationality, and Greek tradition. Diogenes considered his own society to be morally inferior to universal humanity; he saw the virtue of nature itself in totalizing inclusion. But what could he have meant by claiming to be a citizen of this whole?
• The concept of citizenship first arose in the city-states of ancient Greece. The polis, with its distinct religion and traditions, exerted a hold on its inhabitants quite unlike that of a modern liberal democracy governed on principles considered to be universal. The power of the state over individual lives was largely unquestioned. Citizens of a Greek polis felt themselves part of an organic whole more than as distinct individuals. Being a citizen was central to their identity, even their sense of humanity. “For the Greeks, to be without patriotism, to be anything less than an active citizen, was to be an ‘idiot,’” a term refer ing to someone who “retreated from the life of the city,” as Larry Seidentopf explains. Xenophon, a student of Socrates and admirer of Sparta, said that the man who does not understand his duties and obligations to his city is not a man at all, but a beast. The Greeks would fiercely defend their city when it was under threat, but generally showed little sympathy for outsiders, as Thucydides documented in his history.
• When Diogenes called himself a “citizen of the world,” did he imagine a whole world, in harmony with nature, having political institutions that conferred the rights and duties of citizenship? Did he mean that he received his moral outlook from “the world?” In fact, his outlook had developed within a particular context and was expressed in the language of his parents and teachers. There is no question that his universalism—his rejection of societal conventions and national identity, and his effort to cleave to the good in nature—was radical in his time and place. Yet like all radical notions, it grew out of received ideas, in this case the idealism of classical Greek thought. We might see Diogenes as a bridge between the classical and the Hellenistic ways of thinking about particular societies and universal human realities. From then on, the moral universals of nature would increasingly be conflated with the whole of humanity and the diversity of political cultures, regardless of how those cultures thought about universal values or natural law. This trend eventually led to the modern human rights regime, with its emphasis on inte national unity and political consensus rather than shared moral commitments across national boundaries.
• In plain language, natural law refers to moral truths that exist independent of any social arrangements or historical developments. It means a transcendent standard of moral obligations that should guide individual behavior and the actions of ruling powers alike, everywhere. Concepts of natural law are the antecedents of global legislation and institutions designed to enforce an international order, governed in accordance with universal moral standards. International human rights today represents an effort to apply the essentialist principle of natural law to the protection of fundamental human rights against the state, within a system that is embraced but also modified by diverse societies and governments. It is a transmutation of moral law into promulgated international law.
• The political philosopher Pierre Manent, echoing principles that informed the United States Declaration of Independence, observes that human rights cannot be universal in any sense unless we accept universal norms based in nature itself; “we cannot speak of human rights without referring implicitly but directly and concretely to nature.” In short, universal rights must come from natural law. Yet talk of natural law is now considered toxic in the human rights community. For example, hundreds of human rights groups and activists vociferously objected when Mike Pompeo, as the U.S, secretary of state, introduced his project to establish a Commission on Unalienable Rights, which would examine current human rights practice in the light of “natural law and natural rights.” Critics feared that Pompeo, a conservative Christian, was looking to restrict human rights on the basis of religious dogma, and they insisted that any reference to nature was a rationalization for discrimination. Today’s Western human rights community is largely secular, thus subscribing to the view of Jean Paul Sartre that “there is no human nature, because there is no God to have a conception of it.” Members of this community are likely to be less familiar with natural law philosophy than with the theories of Michel Foucault, who rejected any form of extrahistorical consciousness as a fiction. But to reject natural law is to saw off the branch on which the human rights vocation sits—the basis of its moral orientation. To turn away from natural law is to remove international human rights from the realm of principle and lodge it in intergovernmental politics.
• At the heart of the human rights tradition is the natural law principle that the powers of rulers should not impinge upon individual moral choice. Reflections on the moral limits of power and the accountability of rulers to moral law among the pre-Socratic Greeks and the ancient Hebrews were the seeds from which self-critical Western societies would grow. The Torah recounts that midwives (whether Egyptian or Hebrew is unclear), “fearing God,” disobeyed Pharaoh’s order to kill male Hebrew babies (Exodus 1:15–21). The Jewish nation could be saved only if the ruler’s orders were defied. The entire Exodus story is one of answering to God’s laws over and against political authorities when they were in conflict. As Yoram Hazony put it, “the Hebrews appear as rebels against the hubris and self-worship of kings and their states.”
• Natural law manifested itself explicitly in the Decalogue after the Hebrews, heeding the call of God and trusting in his protection, had broken the chains of slavery. Thomas Aquinas observed (Summa Theo. 1–2) that the moral precepts in the Old Law are to be identified as natural law, in contrast to the ceremonial and judicial laws given by God to help the Hebrews deal with particular circumstances. These moral precepts are embedded in our nature. Natural law, wrote Aquinas, is “nothing less than the rational creature’s participation in the eternal law.” Issuing directly from nature or from God, natural law is not founded on his ory or convention. It is the law that informs our moral sense—the law that God implanted into the House of Israel (Jeremiah (31:33): “I will put my law into their inward parts, and write it in their hearts.…”
• The principle that all men and women are subject to universal moral law and unified under it is a common theme in classical Greek thought. While the unity of mankind was rarely articulated as an explicit doctrine, it emerges as an assumption in numerous ancient texts, as documented by H. C. Baldry. Homer’s stories suggest “a single pattern within which all, or almost all, human eings have a place.” Life in different places and times was cast in the same mold, and universal rules of nature applied everywhere. All shared in the capacity to partake of dike, meaning justice or the good, which was a gift from Zeus that could allow man “to live in peace and harmony with one another.” Euripides’ tragedy Medea, first performed in 431 BC, showed a woman defying cultural norms, guided by a transcendent moral compass. The play is considered by the classist Bruno Snell “to portray a human eing who excites pity by the mere fact of being a human being in torment.” The character of Medea is “the first person in literature whose thinking and feeling are described in purely human terms.” Samuel Moyn, a historian of human rights, regards this as a “cosmopolitan breakthrough.”
• Greek literature also provided a seminal archetype of natural law in the legend of Antigone and her defiance of King Creon’s command that her brother be denied a proper burial, having been accused of treason and thus losing the rights of citizenship. In Sophocles’ tragedy, written around 441 BC, Antigone invokes the laws of the gods and her duty to her family as superseding the uler’s edicts. “Nor could I think that a decree of yours— / A man—could override the laws of Heaven / Unwritten and unchanging” (453–455). After being condemned to death, Antigone commits suicide. Creon, who epitomized tyranny to Athenian audiences, eve tually regrets his decision.
• In the Laws, his longest dialogue, Plato drew the parameters of what would come to be known as the idealistic theory of law, describing a natural or ideal law that is universal, in contrast to particular, local laws. The gods care for all men everywhere. To deny the existence of natural law is tantamount to denying the existence of the divine, and of universal nature itself (880–899). Adherence to natural law is what makes peace and order possible. In his Timaeus, Plato depicted a rational cosmos that encompasses human nature, which cannot be understood apart from the whole. The cosmos is governed by a universal law that serves as a pattern for all manmade laws. Plato’s understanding of natural law is of a piece with his ideas about natural human connectedness and what he saw as the rationality of communism.
• Xenophon, too, saw natural law as what establishes universality in human life. In his Memorabilia (4.4), he noted that unwrit en laws are the same in every land, and thus appear to have a divine origin. He also recounted how Socrates observed that transgressions of natural law do not refute its existence.
• Aristotle examined the idea of natural law in Book III of his Rhetoric, where he said that the legend of Antigone concerns “na ural justice.” Antigone distinguishes the laws of men from eternal, immutable, universal law. Aristotle explained that unwritten natural law is “general” law, as opposed to written laws or particular customs and conventions. Natural law exists prior to politics and independent of any political processes or agreements. It never changes (1375a32). It applies everywhere, universally, thus bringing mankind in its diversity together in common subordination to a transcendent moral order.
• In Book 1 of Politics, Aristotle characterized natural law as a moral and intellectual challenge; it is law that should be recognized, but comes with no enforcement mechanism. This brings to mind the “aspirational” quality of international human rights law, which is optional law without serious penalties, and soft-law human rights “standards” produced by international bodies and bearing the imprimatur of universality. In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle argued that nature serves as the moral measure of any human law. At the same time, he maintained that “natural law and legal law represent two different kinds of law, separated y an unbridgeable gap,” as Max Salomon Shellens observed. In the Ethics (and also in Magna Moralia, a book generally attributed to him), Aristotle implied that while natural law might be accepted as legal law, “a promulgated natural law is itself a cont adiction.”
• Aristotle set out rules under which people and communities would flourish, but he left no analysis of relations between communities or states. Because he emphasized a distinction between natural and promulgated law, he did not ponder the question of universal legal norms. He focused on how the political nature of man played itself out in the independent, homogeneous polis, which he regarded as the highest form of polity.
• But that kind of polity, in which the political ideals of classical Greece developed, was on the way out. Autonomous city-states were fading beneath the giant empire that one of Aristotle’s former pupils was building as the new carrier of Hellenic civilization. Aristotle did not discuss the subject of Greek unity, which had been imposed by Macedonian power. On the broader question of how moral and legal harmony could be achieved among the various nations encompassed by Alexander’s conquests, Aristotle reportedly advised his former pupil to act as master over “barbarians,” whom he considered slaves by nature.
• Alexander rejected that advice, as he claimed to be the “heaven-sent harmonizer and reconciler of the whole,” according to the scholar Eratosthenes (third century BC). A text attributed to Plutarch, De Alexandri magni fortuna aut Virtute, tells us that Alexander sought to show that “all earthly affairs are subject to one principle and one government, and that all men are one people.” This is likely a romanticized interpretation of Alexander’s aims, and one reflecting Plutarch’s own perspective as a Roman. But it illustrates how the vision of a morally unified world exerted great attraction in the past, as it still does today. Defenders of empires typically claim they are rooted in a natural unity of peoples, and present themselves as reconcilers and peacemakers under a law of nature. When Aristotle highlighted the power of natural law as a rhetorical tool by which jurists make claims about the sacredness of justice, perhaps he implied that natural law is a useful illusion that can move juries—and can be invoked by ambitious rulers to sway the masses brought under their power.
• The Macedonian Empire at its zenith extended as far east as the Indus River and south to the Arabian Peninsula, encompassing peoples of deeply different cultures and legal practices. It engendered transnational forms of political organization and broke down the city-states’ mental walls. Alexander promoted interracial marriage, multicultural styles of clothing and a multinational army, albeit under the umbrella of Greek culture. He adopted the title of Pharoah in Egypt and incorporated elements of Persian culture in his rule, while also claiming Zeus as his actual father.
• It is not difficult to imagine Alexander having sympathy for Diogenes, the self-proclaimed “citizen of the world.” The cosmopolitanism of Diogenes affirmed “the laws of the cosmos, the laws of nature, in opposition to the customs and conventions of the traditional city.” Alexander’s conquests gave it a geopolitical tone, and his empire was the environment that nurtured Stoic political cosmopolitanism.
• Stoicism is the philosophical school that has arguably contributed most to Western civilization’s aspiration to embody an objective, universal morality, and to the rationalist universalism of modern human rights institutions. In a book that served as a roadmap for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the British jurist Hersch Lauterpacht wrote, “For the Stoics, the equality of man was extended beyond the confines of the State and made the principal manifestation of the universal dominion of reason and of law, higher in authority than the collective will of man acting through the laws of any single State.”
• The Cynic virtue of living in harmony with nature was a primary influence on Zeno of Citium, the founder of Stoicism. Zeno held his lectures in a colonnade of the Athenian Agora known as the Stoa Poikile, or “painted porch,” which is where the movement got its name. Scholars have no actual texts by him, but only interpretations of fragments that no longer exist. Zeno’s ideas are known mainly from references to The Republic, his controversial, long-lost book about the ideal society, apparently framed as an answer to Plato’s work of the same name.
• The early Stoics saw the entire cosmos as being permeated and governed by Logos, a divine principle of rationality, which is implanted in the form of reason into every human soul. Zeno rejected all borders and other barriers between people, thus advocating a sort of globalism under natural law. He held that all people have two dimensions: they are members of the community of their birth, and are also potentially participants in the transcendent “community of human argument and aspiration,” a “virtual city.” In a universal community, there would be “one way of life and order,” guided by reason and in harmony with nature. Such a u opia would be “universal” in the sense of transcending borders and social conventions, but also exclusive in its membership, a “community of the wise” or “the good,” who are capable of exercising reason.
• Zeno’s utopian imaginings illustrate how universalistic moral abstractions, posed as alternatives to the moral traditions of a community, can go wrong. Diogenes Laertius (third century AD), a biographer of philosophers, paraphrased a criticism of Zeno’s Republic as follows:
• [Zeno] declares the good alone to be true citizens or friends or kindred or free men; and accordingly in the view of the Stoics parents and children are enemies, not being wise. Again, it is objected, in the Republic he lays down community of wives, and at line 200 prohibits the building of temples, law-courts and gymnasia in cities; while as regards a currency he writes that we should not think it need be introduced either for purposes of exchange or for travelling abroad. Further, he bids men and women wear the same dress and keep no part of the body entirely covered.
• In the utopia of the wise, there would be no need for law courts or schools; property would be held in common; monogamy would ot be expected; and cannibalism would be normal. In Zeno’s time, as in our own, visions of a society in harmony with nature rather than custom and tradition could take highly unnatural forms. Today, some international human rights legislation challenges raditional values in ways that echo the challenge that Cynic and Stoic thought posed to Greek social norms. Religious conservatives fear that a New World Order shaped by “secular liberalism” is weakening social bonds, threatening the natural family, and detaching the moral instruction of children from parents, as totalitarian systems have often done.
• To be sure, the Stoics had some admirable views; they opposed slavery and promoted social equality, for example. Lord Acton was inspired by their egalitarianism. For the Stoics, he wrote in his History of Freedom, “there is neither Greek nor barbarian, neither rich nor poor; and the slave is as good as his master, for by birth all men are free; they are citizens of that universal commonwealth which embraces all the world, brethren of one family, and children of God.”
• As the expanding boundaries of the known world in the Hellenistic age increasingly revealed the diversity of human life, the S oic concept of oikeiosis provided an ethical formula for judging what is worthy of being accepted and appropriated by the community of the wise. The word, which originated with Zeno, derives from oikos, or “home,” and means finding familiarity and affini y in something foreign. The Stoics believed that people have an inherent capacity for fellow-feeling with strangers and thus for welcoming them into the oikos. An instinctual understanding of the universality of human nature was seen as a basis for global harmony. The cosmopolitan ideal called for both reaching out and drawing in, expanding the sense of affinity beyond one’s immediate family, community, and state.
• Stoicism, more than other philosophical movements, oriented social thought to the view that societies should strive to make universal values respected universally. Especially in its later forms, Stoicism, as Hegel observed, is associated with a decline in the moral authority of the city-state. For a “citizen of the world,” citizenship meant adherence to abstract moral ideals, ra her than the defense of one’s home and ancestral traditions. While the early Stoics posited reason as the foundation for a hypothetical, utopian “cosmic” community of the wise, later Stoics adapted those ideas to a new political environment. As citizens of the Roman Empire, which had gained ascendancy in the second century BC, they merged the moral universalism of classical philosophy with Rome’s political ambitions. Adherence to natural law began to be associated with transnational formations and with political homonoia, meaning order, harmony and a union of hearts.
• Three figures in particular contributed to the transformation of universality from a moral abstraction into a way of accommoda ing the diversity of existing human communities. In the language of modern social science, it was a shift from “normative” to “descriptive” thinking. Whereas the early Stoics saw reason as a potentiality, distributed unevenly, these later philosophers suggested that all men possess reason itself and therefore can be participants in a global community.
• Marcus Tullus Cicero (106–43 BC) considered reason to be the bond of unity among all men, a “natural compact.” Disconnected f om this bond, men are detached from their very nature; they are only “heaps” with no functional abilities, as Plato asserted in the Timaeus. Cicero did not discredit feelings of national belonging, as had the radical Cynics; he affirmed that bonds with o e’s own country are “more serious, more precious, than any other.” But he saw all human beings as united by common moral principles, and he envisioned a “prescriptive moral code” to enforce the common law of nature. Cicero described law itself as “right eason in agreement with nature, universal, unwavering, and everlasting” (De Re Publica III: 22). He identified three forms of law: natural law, civil law, and ius gentium, the law of nations, which is the most mysterious of the three. Natural law consis s of universal principles from God, as distinct from the “enactments of peoples, the edicts of rulers, or the decisions of judges,” all of which “could make justice out of injustice.”
• It appears that Cicero conceived of natural law as a kind of universal constitutional law, but he also saw a clear disjunction between natural law and enforceable law. The law of nature had “no effect on the wicked,” no punitive legal force. Cicero also held that “civil law cannot forbid everything ruled out by the law of nature.” He saw global governance, based on natural law, as inherently benevolent, and he imagined a “humanist brotherhood of all mankind.”
• Lucius Annaeus Seneca (4 BC–65 AD) also envisioned a global community, politically and culturally unified, in which all are citizens of a single state. Rome had made humanity into both a spiritual and a political whole, and the distinction between nature and the state thus dissolved. In the Roman Empire, Baldry observes, the ideal of the philosophical life oriented toward virtue yielded to a focus on “practical realism, linked with factual knowledge.”
• Finally, Marcus Aurelius Antonius (121–180 AD), who reigned as the Roman emperor for nineteen years, thought of the universe as a city. In a sense, he was reverse-engineering the Aristotelian vision of the city, with its hierarchies and inequalities, as an embodiment of the laws of nature. Echoing Cicero’s three legal categories, he famously claimed, “My nature is rational and social; and my city and country, so far as I am Antonius, is Rome, but as far as I am a man, it is the world” (Meditations 6.44). There seems to be little distinction between his attachment to Rome and his affinity for the universal human family; between his status as citizen and as a human being. In the Roman Empire, universal fellowship described what is, not merely what ought to be. Men had brought heaven to earth, or perhaps the other way around.
• In the time of Marcus Aurelius, Roman jurists began to call a rule “natural” when it conformed to “normal conduct or expectation in social relations” and was “universally recognized.” The term ius naturale came to be understood as closely related to ius gentium, referring to rules applicable to all people regardless of nationality, a concept arising from an “assumption that any ule of law common to all nations must be fundamentally valid and just.” The two terms were sometimes used interchangeably. The Roman jurist Gaius, a contemporary of Marcus Aurelius, believed that all nations upheld elements of ius gentium while being governed at home by their own particular laws. Ius gentium was not the same as natural law, but represented its application to international relations.
• When domestic life was relatively peaceful in ancient Rome, little conflict was felt between civil and natural law. Few demanded rights beyond those allowed by civil law, and legal discussion did not give much attention to the relationship between the individual and the state. The Roman citizen could see himself as both a citizen of the Roman Empire and a citizen of the world, living in harmony with natural law like other humans, even without any defined standard of universal law. The political imperatives of global domination came to be conceived as natural law itself. The laws of the empire, seen as reflecting the universal law innate in all humanity, were designed both to support military security and political hegemony and to reconcile the cultural particulars of the lands brought forcibly under Rome’s control. For example, the Roman state tolerated local gods so long as they were subordinated to the cult of the emperor.
• The problem inherent in “universality as inclusivity” was not lost on some contemporary observers. Tacitus saw in Rome “a wide, though also shallower, vision of humanity,” a society “where all things hideous and shameful from every part of the world find their center and become popular” (Annals 15:44). The periphery invaded and polluted the center. Aesthetic and moral distinctions frayed as the empire absorbed more distant lands and diverse cultures. Only in later eras of history was it considered urgent to rationalize the precepts of natural law into a system of global moral governance.
• This brief survey of Stoicism reveals two distinct tendencies of thought that are central to our theme. Both developed from the recognition of a human nature common to all people, but they present different ways of thinking about the implications of a universal morality rooted in natural law.
• Stoics were inclined to endow the all-inclusive, the transcendent, the holistic with moral virtue supposedly lacking in the individual, the family, the community or the state. Since Greek antiquity, Western political culture has often sought to elevate universal, totalizing political structures over those reflecting particular customs and moral principles. Today, this impulse takes a political and legal form in the United Nations General Assembly, regarded as being endowed with the authority of a “parliament of humanity.” Increasingly, people are understood to have rights not by virtue of their humanity as such, but as members o a global “society,” or as “citizens of the world,” with both universal rights and universal responsibilities as “members of a world-wide community,” according to the Global Citizens’ Initiative.
• In Stoic visions of a moralized global community that harmonizes individual and communal mores with natural law and reason, au hority is delegated upward. Within the universal city of virtue, it is implied, individual, family, and community functions will be dissolved into overarching laws for all humanity, contrary to local conventions. Two millennia later, international human ights treaties remove decisions about morally charged issues from local communities and hand them to global quasi-judicial bodies. As an example, the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which has been ratified by almost all members of the United Natio s except the United States, guarantees that children have the right to receive any kind of information, from any source, and to have privacy from their parents. These standards are to be enforced by national courts or, if they fail, by a United Nations t eaty body.
• A different Stoic view of universalism can serve to temper ambitions for a global society under political or legal structures. While the early Stoics “considered the whole world as their native city,” they saw only “devotees of wisdom as their fellow citizens,” noted the historian Philo of Alexandria (first century BC). Universality exists among the wise alone. The capacity for wisdom is everywhere, but wisdom itself can take root only under particular conditions. Early Stoicism confronted the polis and its traditions with abstract concepts of moral harmony across societies, but did not suggest political unification under a regime of natural law. Zeno did not imagine a “cosmopolitan utopia transcending all traditional states.” He held that a world community could only be a cosmic moral polis. In the first generations of Stoic teaching, the unity of mankind was never envisioned as a political or legal formation. Men could truly be bound together only by what was within their souls.
• In Zeno’s view, all people are potentially fellow citizens of a moral community, sharing common moral principles. But this moral unity can be achieved only among the “sages,” who recognize human commonalities through universal reason. Nature’s gift of reason is available to all, but it can be ignored or squandered. Right reason means doing nothing that is forbidden by natural law; it is a dispositional state, not a matter of obedience to commands or written law. Mankind has an inherent capacity to differentiate between good and evil, but not all fulfill their moral potential. Only those who exercise right reason can grasp universals and subject received social constructions to a process of nullification that allows them to live in harmony with others.
• The transnational community of the wise was not a political structure uniting the human race. Zeno and his followers did not e vision a world state. But they did believe that “civic decisions everywhere ought to be regulated by the idea of a virtual moral community of humanity,” as Martha Nussbaum has explained. Stoicism thus gave the world a model for one-world government or globalist totalitarianism, and also the inspiration for a more realistic approach to universal morality—one in which people from diverse societies, sharing in universal reason, can join forces not to build a global utopian society, but to defend the common ights of humanity.
• In the modern world, the modesty of early Stoicism has been washed over by hubristic enthusiasm for a moral empire of law. The e is an inherent contradiction between the principles attached to natural law universalism, on the one hand, and transnational political and legal structures that may have been intended to uphold those universal principles but eventually corrupted them i stead. This contradiction was planted in Western civilization by the ancient Greeks and Romans.
• Classical Greek philosophy was preoccupied with what men and societies ought to do. Almost all classical Greek philosophers characterized man as a social being whose nature could not be fulfilled outside of communal bonds or understood apart from the obligations that came with membership in a polis. But Greek philosophy also inaugurated the radical cosmopolitanism expressed in the “citizen of the world” concept. In the Roman Empire, the “citizen of the world” led to a world of citizens, and the ideal of political institutions conforming to natural law gave way to the belief that nature validated the vulgar politics of a centralized superstate. Hellenistic and Roman political culture initiated a dynamic by which moral universalism would be interpreted in legal and political terms, and would justify empire-building and utopian totalitarianism.
• The Greeks and Romans thus bequeathed to the West a destructive form of idealism that delegitimizes traditions and conventions by subjecting living communities to abstract ideals of natural law in the quest for homonoi. They also left the prototype of a process by which the ideals of natural law can be corrupted when natural morality is promulgated as positive legislation, and when diverse moral systems are gathered under the overextended wings of ius gentium, the precursor of international law.
• The moral foundation for resistance to the “totalitarian temptation” coming out of Athens was provided by Jerusalem. Centuries before the rise of classical Greece, the Hebrews established monotheism as the cosmic orientation that would emphasize individual moral responsibility as the basis of a just society, and by extension a just world. To believe in the oneness of God is the irst and what Jesus called the “greatest” of the commandments that Moses received at Sinai, which placed before mankind the objective fact of God’s universal dominion, and mankind’s consequent moral obligations. In the nineteenth century, the German Jewish philosopher Hermann Cohen identified Judaism as “the historical source of the idea that humanity can be unified by a single set of ethical laws.”
• Hebrew monotheism morally united all of humanity, transcending national and ethnic distinctions with the obligation of each pe son to know God’s will and act in harmony with it. The beginning of the Torah is about the general condition of humanity that God has made in his image. With the introduction of Abraham in Genesis 12, as Rabbi Jonathan Sacks explained, the story becomes one about a people bearing God’s message and obligations, and shows the challenges of their relationship with God. Particular incidents serve to illustrate universal truths. The Torah records that Moses ordered three thousand members of his own tribe to be slaughtered for worshipping an idol, the Golden Calf, and the text records numerous cases of zealous violence toward polytheistic enemies. But even as the Torah becomes the story of the Jews, God does not “lose interest in everyone else,” Sacks wrote. The point of God’s blessing of the Abrahamic family, made five times in Genesis, was to bless all the families and nations on earth. The text repeatedly commands the Hebrews to love and care for “the stranger,” having been strangers in the Land of Egypt themselves. It instructs them to empathize with those outside their community who had experienced a similar history. According to Hermann Cohen, “the alien was protected not because he was a member of one’s clan, religious community or people; but because he was a human being. In the alien, therefore, man discovered the idea of humanity.”
• For the Hebrews, as for the Greeks, the idea of mankind was inspired by contact with outsiders. The Hebrews built an endogamous, bounded nation, but one organized around the idea of the fundamental moral unity of all mankind as subjects of one deity. It was a nation proclaiming the ethical imperatives of God’s law, but skeptical of earthly power and not seeking to impose universal laws on other peoples beyond the Promised Land where it had established itself. The common, God-given nature of mankind was to be discovered within the community, and within the self.
• The ancient Jewish community, bound together by its religious laws, was essentially based on moral individualism. God had made Adam and Eve in his image, with the faculty of moral reasoning so they could communicate with him. The people who emerged from the Garden of Eden were individuals in a prepolitical state of nature, each facing his or her Creator and free to make moral choices—indeed, condemned to do so after tasting the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. All of humanity descended from this couple; all are thus equal in being endowed with the capacity for moral choice and its burdens—“a blessing and a curse” (Deuteronomy 26–28). While each person shares a common human nature with all others, the Talmud teaches, the essence of all humanity exists in each person, and “whoever kills one life kills the world entire.”
• The Stoics discovered the unity of the human race in strangers who manifested familiar traits, including reason. Their perception of a common human nature followed from Greek and Roman exploration and conquest, and it inspired projects of political unification. In Judaism, universality was not something to be achieved, but rather the ultimate moral fact. The universality of natu al law and truth found expression in individual and national spiritual life, not in utopian empire-building.
• The leaders and heroes portrayed in the Torah are not superhuman, half-divine creatures, as Alexander of Macedon claimed to be. They are normal men and women, but nonetheless capable of receiving and acting upon God’s commands. The Torah has been called a polemic against social hierarchies and the absolute power of rulers who claimed divine heritage and cared nothing for the consent of the governed. A man-god could not exist. The ambition to construct a heavenly society on earth is a weakness in human nature that portends disaster and must be derailed. Law within the community must be applied equally to all, as Leviticus 24:22 says: “Ye shall have one manner of law, as well for the stranger as for the homeborn; for I am the Eternal your God.”
• Monotheism is intrinsically universal: there is one deity, and therefore one moral law. The concept of Bittul refers to a process of self-nullification by which the individual leaves identity and uniqueness behind in cleaving to God. Hermann Cohen found in Judaism, a “religion of reason,” the source of the idea that all people could be brought together under a single set of ethical laws. Over the millennia, Jewish universalism has often inspired visions of a politically unified world.
• But the most explicitly political lesson found in the Torah is a warning against uniting humanity for a utopian project, in the myth of the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11:1–9). Among the most central principles of Judaism is the profound separation between mankind and the divine, which accounted for the rejection of the Roman and later the Christian notion of the man-god. The aspiration to build a tower reaching heaven threatened to breach the chasm between humanity and the unknowable essence of God. The capacity to build such a tower rested on the unity of mankind, all speaking the same language and mobilized for the same purpose. It would have resulted in the ability to join God in heaven and to thwart God’s power to punish us for our sins, as Michael Oakeshott observed, since the tower would protect mankind from another great flood. The Tower of Babel was an effort “to subjugate God and Nature to human ambitions.” To block this hubris, God divided mankind into distinct nations with different languages.
• The universality of man’s common ancestry and moral equality would be affirmed in the particularity of the ancient Jewish nation, which embraced universality but rejected an ideology of universalism. The political lesson in the Tower of Babel parable is clear: ambitions for global unity are utopian, dangerous, and at variance with nature or God’s plan.
• International human rights are based on the principle that all people share a common human nature and all possess natural righ s in accordance with universal reason. Don’t universal natural rights logically demand a universal legal system that protects them, in global institutions or perhaps even a world government? Western civilization has gone in this direction since the Enlightenment, whose teachings have been interpreted largely in technocratic, legal-positivistic terms that are open to moral equivalence. Ancient warnings about hubristic utopianism have been ignored or forgotten. We reflexively look for solutions by building up, with ever larger and more all-encompassing projects that give the state or intergovernmental organizations more and more power and moral authority. The result is institutions like the United Nations Human Rights Council, today dominated by dictatorships, poisoning the idea of human rights with hypocrisy, and corrupting the defense of human rights by involving regimes that hold them in contempt.
• Chapter 2 Universalism and Christendom
• “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free person, there is not male and female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28). The Apostle Paul’s proclamation landed with stunning effect in a world where everyone’s life was defined by ascriptive cultural categories, and through the ages it has inspired a variety of distortions ranging from one-world socialism to gender politics. In Paul’s day, the principle of unity in Christ was more than a revealed truth; it was an urgent and revolutionary message to be carried throughout the world.
• “The religious command to share the word of God in Christ implies a universalizing ambition,” as Neil Walker points out. This aim was encapsulated in the word “catholic,” derived from Greek and Latin words meaning what is universal, the whole, and first attached to the Christian Church by St. Ignatius of Antioch in about 110 AD. The Catholic Church would unite all people in devo ion to God within a kingdom of justice and peace, a concept suggesting an “architecture of global governance.” Alongside the nuanced Greek ideas about universal reason, the Judeo-Christian belief in one God and a unitary moral truth led to accepting the intrinsic virtue of uniting separate polities under divine commands and moral obligations.
• From the beginning, however, Christian ideas of universalism held contradictions similar to those in Greek thinking about the unity of mankind. Catholic universalism would inspire efforts to bring disparate regimes into harmony under a common moral law, yet early Christian prophecy warned against the dangers of global governance. About sixty years after the execution of Jesus, o e of his Jewish followers, John of Patmos, recorded terrifying visions of violence and oppression resulting from unified earthly power. Chapter 7 of his Book of Revelation (which became part of the Christian canon) drew upon the prophet Daniel’s dreams in which all-encompassing Gentile kingdoms appeared in the form of ghastly beasts. A blasphemous tyrant would emerge, speaking “great words” against God, and would “change the times and the laws” (Rev. 7:24–25). Daniel prophesied a catastrophic end to Ge tile kingdoms with the coming of the Son of Man and his everlasting dominion.
• Like Daniel, whose dreams occurred during his exile in Babylon, John of Patmos had witnessed the terrors of imperial dominatio as a refugee from Rome’s war against the Jews and destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem (70 AD), one of the largest and most violent battles of antiquity. He wrote as a conservative Jewish teacher and admirer of Jesus. The beast he saw as the architec of global hegemony is understood in Christian prophetic literature as the Antichrist, a usurper claiming to be God. In John’s prophecy, universal political rule would erase freedom through the control of commerce (Rev. 13:16–17). Secular power would be conflated with sacred authority in Babylon’s godless utopia, whose violent destruction in the End of Days would clear the way for the establishment of God’s kingdom.
• In modern times, these biblical texts have fueled hostility to the United Nations and institutionalized globalization among evangelical Christians. Left Behind, a series of sixteen novels depicting a future struggle between Christians and a deceptive leader who inspired the formation of a “Global Community,” has been an international bestseller, with some titles selling over 65 million copies. According to a Washington Post article, “nothing has captured conservative American evangelicalism at the turn of the century as well.” Christian millennialists have seen the Antichrist or Babylon in secular empires such as the Ottoman Empire, the Soviet Union, and even the European Union. Yet as advocates for a global kingdom of Christ, they have not been opposed to some form of world government per se. Contradictions of this kind are deeply embedded in Christian thinking about universalism.
• Christianity derives from Jewish monotheism, which is “necessarily universalistic,” although the central Christian doctrine of the deity incarnate makes it not “strictly monotheistic” itself. In Christianity, God assumed a form that was vividly recognizable to Jews who sought a less abstract and legalistic faith, and also attractive to pagans—a divine redeemer in human form resembling a man-god like those with which Romans were familiar. Christianity was announced by the Apostles as both a fresh, personal faith that could overcome sin and death, and an eternal truth that preceded all else in time and transcended space. In Athens, St. Paul defended himself against accusations of preaching a new religion by proclaiming his devotion to the one God who predated the city (Acts of the Apostles 17:24).
• The first Jewish followers of Christ thought of their faith as fully consistent with their ancestral tradition, whose teachings and rules stayed in place even though the Messiah had come. But with Paul’s ministry to the gentiles, strict Jewish laws like circumcision and dietary restrictions were dropped, while attitudes toward pagans softened. Christianity then became a revolutionary faith, not attached to any nation or tribe but open to all. It was animated by an irenic spirit and goal—the goal of universal moral harmony and reconciliation in the world.
• Paul gave Christian monotheism its horizontal dimension as a faith seeking universal salvation and breaking down barriers between individuals and communities. Christ was the savior of all mankind (1 Timothy 4:10). Everyone could be united under the one true God. According to the Pauline doctrine, the Church represented a universal holy society—an idealization rather than a bounded institution. Christianity found the decisive evidence of natural law in Creation itself. Universality was intrinsic to Creation, an all-encompassing moral truth.
• While Judaism’s foundational principle was the moral equality of all people, Christianity introduced concrete ways to implemen that ideal. First, it promised that all of humanity could be united spiritually in a common faith that negated social and geographical boundaries. Then, it began spreading the creed far and wide, transforming an abstract principle into an activist program.
• In the Apostolic Age, missionaries of uncertain authority or regulation—mobile, fluid, and spontaneous—carried forth the unive salist message. Christianity grew dramatically, at first consisting of small groups meeting in house churches with no central authority and no definitive body of sacred texts, as the canon of scripture was still open. Unity existed in a common faith, not institutional connection. But the drive to harvest souls for a moral virtual city opened a path to institutionalized universalism, and Christianity edged toward Rome. “In the Acts of the Apostles, it is already implied that the Empire, under the providence of God, could be the instrument for the furtherance of the Gospel,” noted Henry Chadwick. The emergence of bishops overseeing a pastoral ministry represented a movement from vitality to formalism, from lay democracy to authoritarianism, and from freedom to inflexibility. The variety of personal spiritual experience would give way to mediated religious life and an insistence on conformity; “since the Church is one, its beliefs and practices should be uniform.”
• Origen of Alexandria (c. 185–c. 253) described the Church as humanity’s all-encompassing “house,” which was distinctive in ancient society for being detached from ethnic categories. Inspired by the charismatic spark of Christ’s personality and teachings, this spiritual “house” was externalized in habitual patterns of action and perception. These patterns would be transmitted to subsequent generations as a moral duty, becoming a tradition with its own dynamic.
• The Bible made a totalizing claim to truth, obliterating any distinction between the objective and the normative. As the autho itative interpreter of the holy scriptures, the Church claimed a monopoly on the means of union with God. “No man can find salvation except in the Catholic Church,” preached Augustine in his Sermo ad Caesariensis Ecclesia plebem in 418.
• The Roman Empire’s acceptance of Christianity under Constantine was a key moment in Western civilization. Constantine’s decision to embrace the creed himself appears to have been largely a personal one, but for the ruler of a sprawling empire there were also practical benefits in a policy that “accepted all cults not obviously immoral as equally valid ways of venerating the deity.” The most popular form of paganism at the time was “solar monotheism,” which made the transition smooth for Constantine, and for Rome. Toward the end of the fourth century, Theodosius the Great outlawed pagan cults and made trinitarian Christianity the official religion of the empire. Thus began a close association of spiritual and political authority, a “political Christianity.”
• The evangelical strategy of the Church converged with the politics of the empire, as both sought to incorporate fringe elements in the interest of forging a unitary polity and culture. The Church’s institutional model was inspired by the Roman transmutation of Stoic moral universalism as the foundation for a political empire. When the Western Roman Empire collapsed and its exoskeleton lay in ruins, the Catholic Church replaced it in the public imagination as the manifestation of the universal dominion of God. Canon law found a template in Roman law, which had come to be regarded as the “universal law of the world.” Thomas Hobbes would later describe the papacy as “no other than the Ghost of the deceased Roman Empire sitting crowned on the grave thereof.” But the Church extended itself beyond the boundaries of Rome as it “conquered” lands by the power of divine truth where Roman legions had failed.
• Thus Christendom emerged as the physical form of a new universalism, under the mantle of the Roman Catholic Church. While the authority of its clerical hierarchy may have been politically weak and its enforcement of standards uneven and often corrupt, the Church was nonetheless seen as embodying the moral unity of mankind. Its doctrine was the stipulated sacred truth that encompassed all of history and politics.
• In medieval Europe, wrote Erich Auerbach, the world of the scriptures was “the only real world,” and human history had a subordinate place in this framework. “We are to fit our own life into its world, feel ourselves to be elements in its structure of universal history.” The whole society was “saturated” with Christianity, which served as its “cementing bond.” The creed was embraced not as a matter of choice, but as the immediate and only possible response to God’s invincible command. In this Age of Faith, atheism seems not even to have been imagined; apparently the first known, avowed atheist was Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677).
• The unity of medieval Christendom was forged by Catholic moral absolutism. In The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches, a seminal nineteenth-century book in the sociology of religion, Ernst Troeltsch described medieval Europe’s “unitary culture” as one of “authority and compulsion.” The historian Paul Johnson called the medieval Catholic Church “totalitarian, admitting no competitors.” The model of moral unity under the institutional Church would contribute to the modern view that universal moral norms are best realized by inclusive transnational institutions and law in a top-down approach.
• A core Christian belief is that each human personality is sacred, yet the medieval worldview had a bias against individualism. The pursuit of particular interests—by individuals or polities—carried the threat of damnation; both religious and secular authorities discouraged sovereign initiative. Christians generally believe that all humans, in their common nature, seek “solidarity with others; an intimacy of real organic union.” The shared pursuit of salvation would unite individuals and polities in one moral order.
• The medieval Catholic Church was conceived as a “divinely established society” uniting the separate cities of man. Unlike othe institutions in society, it was understood not simply as an aggregate of individuals but as an “ontological reality,” a corporate social body led by the spirit of Jesus Christ. The Church embodied “a kingdom in which worldly institutional forms are inve ted,” where leaders, in principle, are to serve rather than rule, allowing pure solidarity.
• Medieval thinking about an international society of Christians drew upon the political-philosophical template that St. Augusti e provided in The City of God. This highly influential work describes two societies that are intermingled on earth: the City of God, which is the society of the elect, and the City of Man, consisting of the dammed. The City of God is a work in progress a d will eventually be present in all societies on earth, consistent with biblical prophecy. Secular kingdoms are necessary, required by the order of nature, but all rulers have moral obligations that derive from a single source. When they forget their duty to God and neglect their communal obligations, they display the sins of “ambition” and “proud sovereignty” (153–154). Indeed, states and other institutions all tend to drift toward self-aggrandizement. The interests of local rulers often conflicted with the universal interests of mankind, over which the pope claimed authority. Maintaining a transcendent basis for cohesion was the dominant theme of religious and political life in the Middle Ages.
• In Augustine’s political theology, “it is the members of the Heavenly City who ought to perfect the State, healing its wounded nature and restoring the free character of its rule,” according to Josef Loessl. Augustine believed that the Church should be the guide of a morally unified Christian international order as its reach encompassed increasingly diverse nations. “If, to be sure, while here on earth the celestial society increases itself out of all languages, being unconcerned by the different temporal laws that were made,” it will nonetheless recognize ”the coherence of men’s wills in honest morality … not breaking but observing their diversity in diverse nations.”
• Thus could the Church forge unity among men while avoiding its moral hazards, as illustrated in the presumptuous project of building the Tower of Babel, to which God had responded by imposing divisions of language and nationality. The Church would heal those divisions and reunify mankind while restraining the arrogance displayed in the attempt to reach heaven and become like angels. Instead, the Church brought heaven to all who embraced it. In his Homilies on John, Augustine wrote:
• If pride caused diversities of tongues, Christ’s humility has united these diversities in one. The Church is now bringing toge her what that tower had sundered. Of one tongue there were made many; marvel not: this was the doing of pride. Of many tongues there is made one; marvel not: this was the doing of charity. For although the sounds of tongues are various, in the heart one God is invoked, one peace preserved.
• This ideal of a spiritual unity that respects human diversity offers a solution to the basic dilemma of empire and unified authority—to the tension between center and periphery—and indeed, to the paradoxes of universalism. The outer wall of the Church’s universalism rested on God’s infinite dominion. The unification of fallen humanity under the Church and morally correct secular institutions rested on the salvation of souls within its walls. Christianity taught that while the sins of Eden had infected all people and given Satan power over their souls, all could be made whole again through baptism and confession. God had the powe to redeem all men and women, to remove the stain of universal sin, including the sin of following one’s individual desires, in neglect of the community.
• The international human rights regime of the present is anchored by the notion that sovereign governments will transform themselves in harmony with global standards through interaction with United Nations bureaucracies, dialogue concerning compliance with human rights treaties, and peer pressure from other states. This idea apparently derives from a theory of change and progress toward unity that originates in the medieval, Augustinian model of a global Christian society.
• What made Augustine’s Christian world system work in theory was a doctrine of free will, whereby people can change their nature. Christ’s teachings in the Gospels had challenged the classical view that human nature is universal and fixed. In the Christian view, nature was no longer the cosmic force governing the world, but was to serve as God’s handmaiden. Instead of becoming a “citizens of the world” by cleaving to nature’s laws, as in Stoic philosophy, one could become part of a universal Christian society by changing one’s nature in accordance with God’s will, through sacred institutions. Embracing Jesus redeems and transfigu es human nature by God’s grace, thus reconciling differences and resolving the contradictions of universalism.
• A transformed human character and a morally unified world community could be achieved through Christ, and the belief or hope that this could happen was an achievement of faith. Early Christians found evidence in their own communities that faith in Jesus made harmony and unity possible. Outsiders noticed it too, which drew more converts. “The manifest effect of Christianity upon he morality of its adherents certified its divine origin,” according to Max Weber.
• Human nature was made dynamic by faith, enabling individuals to accept their place in a Christian social order. The moral equality of all before God rendered meaningless the hierarchies of earthly society, while those hierarchies would remain in place. Social inequalities were regarded as fixed and not to be challenged if harmony was to be maintained. In effect, the doctrine of moral equality within the City of God ratified the static social relations of medieval society.
• Belief in Providence gave assurance that God cared for all human beings, that their fate was in God’s hands, and that God’s ac ivism in the world sacralized events in transitory individual lives and society. People felt that they belonged to the “great corporation of Christendom” as much as to any local group. They shared in communion with all members of a moral community, in an idealized state of unity among individuals, groups and nations.
• John Eppstein, author of The Catholic Tradition of the Law of Nations (1935), held that the City of God “convinced Europeans hey were part of a single whole.” Yet Augustine was no proponent of a Christian global government. As both a Christian bishop and a judge in a Roman court, he had a low opinion of the Roman Empire that was collapsing around him, even after it had been oficially Christianized. In his political theology, the state could deliver justice if it was guided by God’s law, but the earthly order could never be fully sacralized. Instead, the Church would reach across borders and boundaries, bringing people to God hrough immediate noetic experience. Every true Christian was a citizen of the City of God, a concept echoing the early Stoic idea that the good and wise are “citizens of the world.” The realization of the common good in a perfect Christian fellowship was an ideal; it could be real only in the world of ideas.
• Major intergovernmental human rights organizations were founded in the twentieth century not just to protect individual human ights, but also to forge peace and unity among nations. The United Nations Charter speaks of “harmonizing the actions of nations” around common principles. The aim of the Council of Europe, founded by signatories to the European Convention on Human Rights, was “to achieve a greater unity between its members,” in part through “the maintenance and further realisation of human rights and fundamental freedoms.” The Council of Europe and the UN human rights institutions are essentially social engineering projects intended to civilize their members and ensure peace by protecting human rights that are declared to be universal.
• Transnational human rights institutions are expressions of a tradition that grew out of medieval Christendom’s perennial quest for peace. In Christian ethics, the seven deadly sins were particularly wrong because they were antisocial, while the supreme virtue was communitas. The intense longing for peace in the Middle Ages was a response to chronic violence, cruelty, and abuses of power by feudal lords and rulers.
• The Church took a leading role as defender of the vulnerable, and it bestowed on kings and princes an aura of sanctity to support their function as peacekeepers. A king wore a crown representing a “halo of divinity,” with Roman and German pagan roots, and was anointed by a bishop in a rite that invested a person or object with a sacred character. At the same time, the consecration of kings by priests signified that the spiritual power was supreme. The king’s sacred power protected the weakest members of society in the royal peace of the Carolingian era. Starting in the later tenth century, clerics and laypeople joined together i movements known as the Peace of God and the Truce of God, which were recurrent efforts to quell local violence by appealing to the spiritual unity of all Christians.
• In principle, society in Christendom was governed by a law identified with Christian justice and conceived as universal, thus applicable to nobles and serfs alike. This principle has been seen as a precursor to the modern, liberal rule of law. In reality, neither the ideal of Christian justice nor the king’s “halo of divinity” suppressed the conflict and brute-force exploitation that regularly destroyed lives and property. Perhaps a lack of respect for life and a tolerance of suffering as normal arose from a deep-seated fatalism, with human life seen as “a transitory state before Eternity.”
• Beneath the religious uniformity and static social hierarchy of medieval society, there was profound insecurity. St. Augustine noted that societies composed of numerous polytheistic cults, each with its own myths that few people actually believed, were more cohesive than Christian communities in which all worshiped a universal God.
• Catholicism developed into a “historical institution that married human substance … with political or representative form.” Th ough this institution, a Christian utopia could be established where all participated in a universal communion founded upon a shared faith and sustaining it. One faith, one Church glued Christendom together. While a durable caesaropapist empire emerged i the east, a multitude of small kingdoms in the west were joined within a single religious culture, despite some friction between church and state.
• The Catholic Church, like Rome, had achieved a wide but shallow unity in an ambitious expansion and the incorporation of diverse belief systems.
• The project of self-definition and consolidation became more urgent when Islamic armies started cutting into “the ruined shell of the Roman Empire.” The conquests of Charlemagne brought Europe out of the Dark Ages and created a new empire intended both as heir to the Roman Empire and as “a supreme Christian empire over the world.” After the Carolingian Empire was divided, the ti le of emperor persisted but without the corresponding authority, while the unity of the institutional Church remained. So, too, did the idea of a global political authority, a sacred world empire modeled on that of Rome. Rudolf Sohm (1841–1917), a scholar of church history and canon law, wrote that the vision of “[restoring] to humanity the perfect form of its political life,” that is, the Roman Empire, animated medieval kingdoms. In 962, King Otto of Germany was crowned Holy Roman Emperor, and for centuries this institution fitfully carried forward the concept of a universal Christian government.
• In an extended tug of war between emperors and popes, Christendom vacillated between two ideals: rule by a secular Dominus Mundi, lord of the world, with nations having little more sovereignty than Rome’s imperial provinces; or governance by the pope as the Judex Omnium, the judge over all. Both models validated centralization and transnational unity under common moral norms. In reality, only the Catholic Church under the Roman pontiff was ever able to claim a kind of authority over all of western Christendom, although not in temporal affairs.
• The Great Schism of 1054 had decisively split the Christian world in two, but also motivated the western Church to reassert its claim to universality. For centuries, the Church approached this challenge with the flexibility that had made Christianity attractive as Rome’s state religion, promoting unity in form while tolerating diversity in the application of principles. “The broadmindedness of the Church was a feature of its absolute unity and supremacy,” according to Paul Johnson. The Church could tolerate eccentric understandings of Christianity within its dominion and keep sinners in its embrace by offering the possibility of confession, forgiveness, and redemption.
• Popes and canonists set out to develop “a distinctively Christian legal system” that would apply universally. By the time of Pope Innocent IV (1243–1254), canon law was conceived as applying not only to Christian kingdoms, but also to those of other faiths, all of which were to be subject to papal authority. Canon lawyers “sought to establish that there was a moral law (‘natural’ law) superior to all human laws, and, consequently, that the spiritual realm cannot be made subject to the secular sphere,” writes Larry Siedentop. He also notes that “the canonists’ egalitarian concern for individual conscience and free will led them gradually to recast natural law as a system of natural rights,” and thus “laid the foundation of modern liberalism.”
• Thomas Aquinas, who was mainly interested in questions of universal importance rather than national or societal issues, held that the ultimate goal of law is the common good of all mankind. He regarded law as “plan-orientated,” an instrument of transformation and redemption. Aquinas affirmed Aristotle’s assertion that natural law is intrinsically distinct from promulgated law. While a wise authority can grant dispensations from human positive law, no dispensation is possible from natural law, which come from God.
• In medieval Europe, natural law was considered the basis for ius gentium, the “law of nations,” a form of common law nowhere codified as statute. Since classical antiquity, ius gentium had been a matter of tacitus consensus omnium, or silent consent by all, something thought to be innate among rational actors. Aquinas taught that ius gentium was “immediately derived from deduction from the natural law” and was “universally applicable across jurisdictional boundaries.” It was “grounded both in natural law and the human reasoning that created the institutions that flow directly from natural law.”
• The law of nations was understood not only as a body of moral principles held in common by all rulers in the Christian world, ut also as an expression of universal natural law, and therefore it applied everywhere. This way of thinking would eventually contribute to the ambitions of international human rights legislation, and to the ambiguity that plagues it. Eric Posner, a law professor at the University of Chicago and a harsh critic of international human rights law, has written that its central problem is being “hopelessly ambiguous,” with poorly defined obligations, “which allows governments to rationalize almost anything they do.” States that repress basic freedoms can sign on to those ambiguous obligations, which are only quasi-legal in that compliance is not adjudicated by courts with democratic legitimacy, and violations incur no serious punishments.
• Christianity gifted humanity with the ideal of the sacredness of personality. As the edifice of Christendom developed, however, the human person was understood as sacred by virtue of being stamped with the imprimatur of the Church as the Body of Christ. In the medieval world, individuals had little sense of autonomous identity. Over time, the immediacy of Christ’s redeeming grace became rarer at the center of religious life, displaced by the rituals and institutions of the Church. Inner-worldly asceticism was directed into monastic orders with strict rules of poverty, chastity, and obedience, while the laity lived under less rigid strictures. The sacrament of penance gained great importance as an institutionalized ritual of self-examination and conscience that allowed ordinary Christians a means of approximating asceticism. Thus, “[t]he locus of accountable moral action shifted rom the individual to the ecclesiastical institution.”
• At the same time, the clerical hierarchy grew more distant from the lives of the laity and often disconnected from a spiritual calling. The problems of a bureaucratized Church were not lost on its leaders, but responses to those problems tended to perpetuate them. In the late eleventh century, Pope Gregory VII initiated reforms to rein in clergy who were seen as having become too independent. Gregory believed that the Church had lost the spirit of the Apostles, and his remedy was to reassert papal control over the selection of bishops and abbots. The result, according to Max Weber, was “the effective elimination of local intermediary powers, by transforming them into pure functionaries of the central authority.” Domination by Rome made local parishes little more than “passive ecclesiastical tax units.”
• The core dynamics of the episode have been repeated many times, such as when the European Union has answered challenges to cen ralized rule by instituting more centralization. Today, many people fear that global institutions will reduce national governments to little more than administrative units. The tendency to concentrate all decision-making at the top is a perennial challenge to projects, organizations, nations, and transnational institutions.
• The syndrome affecting the medieval Church impressed itself on historians and social scientists, mainly German Protestants, as something intrinsic to institutionalization. In this process, “charisma,” the sense of immediate connection with the sacred, tends to be “rationalized” and “routinized,” while moral clarity and creativity both suffer. Rudolf Sohm chronicled the growth of ecclesiasticism, dogmatism, and scholastic speculation about the divine in church history, showing how legalism and earthly power had caused the Catholic Church to fall from Gospel into law.
• As the institutions of Catholicism became more hierarchical and differentiated, spiritual life was increasingly mediated by au horities. The fully developed truths of revelation were limited to priests and theologians, according to the doctrine of fides explicita. Max Weber found that Christianity’s “intrinsic intellectualism … produced an unexampled mass of official and binding rational dogmas,” a “theological faith.” Intellectualism was cultivated in medieval universities, where scholastic theologians employed Greek philosophy to debate abstract doctrinal points with little relevance to ordinary believers. In the later Middle Ages, religious practice took the form of extreme, symbolic rituals, wrote Johan Huizinga, describing “an age filled with religious reverence for all pomp and grandeur.”
• In a well-known lecture, Malcolm Muggeridge observed that “Christendom is something quite different from Christianity, being the administrative or power structure, based on the Christian religion and constructed by men.” But this power structure was contrary to Christ’s statement that his kingdom is “not of this world.” With that declaration, said Muggeridge, “Christ abolished Christendom before it began.”
• Muggeridge’s distinction between Christianity and Christendom can be analogized with what has happened to human rights as they have become institutionalized in transnational organizations. There is no religion of human rights, but there are moral principles that define human rights and guide the protection of individual liberty. When applied with integrity, these principles are a measure of the morality and legitimacy of governments. But the bureaucratization of human rights in centralized global institutions, subject to ideological exploitation, has blurred and distorted the meaning of human rights.
• An institutionalized and juridical approach to human rights is at the center of liberal internationalism. There is a difference, however, between a human rights campaign based on the universality of natural rights, and efforts to rationalize and codify the moral commands of natural law. We need another approach to defending natural rights, one that is free from illusions about how overarching global bureaucracies can change human rights politics within societies, and one that allows the ideal of freedom to remain uncompromised and sacrosanct.
• George Santayana described Christendom as that “universal order once dreamt of and nominally almost established,” an “empire o universal peace, all-permeating rational art, and philosophical worship … the echo of a former age of reason.” Shared religious faith, discipline and moral obligation unified people within societies, and to some extent also unified societies within Christendom. The beliefs and sentiments that guided the actions of individuals in their societies seemed to govern the behavior of states in relation to each other: Christendom established an enduring ideal of moral unity among diverse political entities—an ideal that has periodically resurfaced in the wake of crisis.
• Christendom as a coherent international structure developed on a foundation of late Stoic and Roman universalism, which held that a unifying moral and legal framework could join distinct societies into an ordered, harmonious and peaceful whole. As a practical matter, the Catholic Church’s supranational authority is what glued it together. Some medieval popes made bold claims to supremacy in temporal as well as spiritual power, most famously Boniface VIII in Unum Sanctum (1302). But his confrontation with King Philip IV of France led to the pope’s captivity for two days in 1303, an incident that demonstrated the ascendance of na ion-states. When Boniface died shortly thereafter, the Church’s pretentions to political universality had ended.
• During the papacy’s “Babylonian Captivity” in Avignon (1309–1377), Dante wrote De Monarchia (1312), in which he rejected the idea of world government under papal rule and argued against allowing popes to intervene in secular affairs. This treatise might be seen as foreshadowing a liberal separation of church and state, though it actually endorsed a kind of caesaropapism as the key to peace and tranquility. Only a secular monarch could pacify and reconcile a multitude of warring local powers.
• The Church’s moral authority was also coming under serious question, which opened the way for the broad processes we call the Renaissance and the Reformation. Medieval scholars and theologians had long drawn upon pagan philosophy and learning, which they strove to reconcile with Christian doctrine. What distinguished the Renaissance was a new willingness to challenge received au hority. These challenges were made possible by a decline in the Church’s moral standing, as Norman Davies explained.
• The essence of the Renaissance lay not in any sudden rediscovery of classical civilization but rather in the use which was made of classical models to test the authority underlying conventional taste and wisdom. It is incomprehensible without reference to the depths of disrepute into which the medieval Church, the previous fount of authority, had fallen.
• By spotlighting the moral wisdom to be found independent of Church teaching, the Renaissance inspired more boldness in challenging the authority of the Catholic Church in spiritual matters.
• The Protestant Reformation shattered the Church’s monopoly on pronouncing sacred truth, and its power “was gradually corralled into the private sphere.” With its emphasis on the individual conscience in the “right to examine” and the rejection of an overarching institutional religious authority, Protestantism opened up the mental space for the principle of natural rights, unders ood through the faculty of reason. As John Witte writes, “The Protestant Reformation permanently broke the unity of law and confession in Western Christendom, and it thereby introduced the foundations for the modern constitutional system of confessional pluralism.”
• The Church’s self-interested claim that assertions of both individuality and national sovereignty were reprobate lost moral fo ce. So did its claim that universal peace and justice could be realized only in transnational communalism. The Reformation disenchanted the transnational community that had grown under the spiritual authority of the Catholic Church.
• Anthropocentric humanism led away from the collective orientation of Christendom toward the sovereign nation-state as “the collective counterpart of the autonomous human person.” Nation-states adopted one or another variant of Christianity as their official creed. Eventually, after the shock of brutal religious wars, they fitfully accommodated themselves to confessional pluralism, groping toward the principle of tolerance with freedom of conscience and expression.
• Christendom no longer existed as a coherent international structure and a relatively peaceful corporate reality (despite chronic local violence). But the ideal of a morally cohesive community of nation-states would reemerge in the form of an “international society” bound together by rules that are based on natural law, essentially as it had been understood in Christendom. An idealized image of Christendom’s peace and harmony still endures as a goal of international life, inspiring proposals for a world where diverse polities adhere to common moral standards that foster both domestic and international tranquility.
• The ghost of Christendom lived on in the form of secular international law, which began taking shape amidst the turmoil and tragedy of devastating wars and civil conflicts. Secular international law was a form of universalism rooted in Christian theology and ethics, but detached from any central authority, and in search of a new one. The notion of an international society under a common secular law inspired efforts to develop international authorities to govern relations between states and regulate how rulers treated their own citizens. In theory, a juridical international society was universal: the law of nations applied to eve y nation. Distinct political entities were conceived as individuals, all accountable to transcendent laws—the laws of nature. Collectively, nations were seen as a moral community, unified by common laws governing their conduct toward each other.
• This moral community of nations would not be like a “cosmic city” of the wise, who through reason could recognize universals a d honor the laws of nature. Instead, the emerging nation-states would be constituents of a legal city, with divergent and disputable interests and responsibilities under the rule of law. The contradictions of universalism thus carried into the modern era, no longer in a theocratic empire under divine law, but in a “society” of disparate nation-states. It would lead toward a universalism without God.
• The Dutch jurist, theologian and philosopher Hugo Grotius (1538–1645) is today often considered the father of modern natural law and of globalism, liberal internationalism, and international law. Grotius was disturbed by the interreligious violence of the Thirty Years’ War. A Calvinist, he urged ecumenism among Christian denominations and contributed ideas to the Peace of Westphalia, which brought the war to an end in 1648. In the early modern mind, that long war presented a horrifying antithesis to the relative intersocietal peace of Christendom, showing that religious pluralism required moral and legal regulatio to prevent bloodshed.
• The Thirty Years’ War devastated Central Europe, especially Germany. Originally fought between Catholic and Protestant states, it became a regional conflagration that killed over eight million people, including as much as 40 percent of the German population. At its conclusion, the constituent parts of the Holy Roman Empire gained more autonomy, which further eroded the concept o a transnational political order. The war “shattered pretentions to universality or confessional solidarity.” But it also inspired secular, rational and legal forms of universalism that influence international politics, law and institutions to the presen day.
• The primary architect of that tradition was Grotius, who posited a natural inclination toward transnational “sociability” and “international society.” He suggested that both reason and moral principles influence how states behave, but lamented that nations within the Christian world had demonstrated a “lack of restraint in relation to war, such as even barbarous nations should be ashamed of.” Grotius saw adherence to reason and Christian moral commands as both a universal duty and a goal to be achieved through international law. At the same time, he endeavored to construct a rationale for a secular law of nations that could transcend cultural particulars in the absence of an institutionalized divine sanction. He aimed to establish rules for interactions between independent states that allowed them to pursue their own advantage while adhering to collective legal obligations.
• For Grotius, international law is natural because it “reflects the aspiration to human sociability,” notes John Parry. It “reflects, derives from, or simply is natural law in some sense of the term.” Grotius based his concept of international law on Stoic ideas about sympathetic feelings of commonality with people from other communities and an innate tendency to recognize a “mutual tie of kinship among men.” In the Prolegomena to The Law of War and Peace, he wrote about a natural sociability that guided the behavior of nations and about a natural desire for tranquility, another Stoic idea, as foundations of international law. He also thought of (unwritten) natural law governing the conduct of states as deriving from consensual adherence to “the precept of Judeo-Christian charity.”
• Grotius, echoing Marcus Aurelius, wrote that “the human race is like a great people, and hence some philosophers call this world a city.” He had many terms for the world order he envisioned, though possibly the one he used most often was “human society.” Others were the “brotherhood of man,” the “world state,” a “commonwealth,” and “that society which embraces all mankind.” In his thinking, “the totality of international relations could be systematically subjected to law” by a “superstructure of legal and moral principles: a combination of natural, human and divine laws, a world governed by law.”
• The foundation of a universal legal order was “right reason,” which promoted “universal accord … in relation to that which is good and true,” according to Grotius. Being based on common reason, the law of nations requires no higher sovereign reigning over independent nations. Reflecting on the importance of Grotius for international relations, John U. Neff said,
• What is most significant for subsequent history in his work on war and peace is the insistence that legal principles exist in he human reason, independent of any actual worldly authority, political or religious, yet binding in the world—principles which should govern in all contingencies arising out of breaches of the peace between sovereign states.
• Natural law was a “law of reason that pertained only to rational creatures” who are capable of transcending their self-interes fo good of the whole.
• Grotius regarded states at least potentially as rational actors, and he opposed any effort to institutionalize the rule of reason. He believed that reason itself led to the conclusion that world government (“universal dominion”) is not practical: “For as a ship may be built too large to be conveniently managed, so an empire may be too extensive in population and territory to be directed and governed by one head,” despite the “expediency of universal empire.”
• These positions show an ambiguity about universality, resulting from the multivocality of the natural law philosophy that Grotius inherited. According to this tradition, reason is universal but not found in all men or all societies. A law of nations based on natural law, which is accessible by reason, could apply only to societies where it was understood and embraced. At the same time, Grotius wrote of “international society” as something all-inclusive. Today, his heirs among the “idealists” in international relations theory have trouble assimilating malign and evil rulers and hate-filled populations within an international orde based on moral rules.
• Grotius is credited not only as a founder of the idea of a secular international legal order, but also as someone who early on recognized the existence of natural rights, or what he called “that Right, which every man has to his own … the power, that we have over ourselves, which is called liberty.” This principle developed into the so-called “Grotian ideal,” which holds that ruling authorities should limit their own power and security in order to respect the natural liberties of their constituents.
• Grotius believed that all states should be equal in the eyes of international law and did not suggest differentiation based on respect for natural rights. He favored intervening in the internal affairs of other states when their rulers abused citizens, but doing so for the purpose of punishing violators of natural law rather than protecting the abused (who have no right to resist). He saw this intervention as a means of preserving international order. Samuel von Pufendorf, the influential German legal scholar much influenced by Grotius, held that such intervention should occur only when requested by citizens and when they have a constitutional right to resistance.
• It is not difficult to see why Grotius is often seen as the godfather of utopian legalistic internationalism, and perhaps of t ansnational progressivism. As Mario Alexis Portella put it, he “tried to create in a ‘comprehensive and systematic manner’ a universal standard that would incorporate all legal rules given to ‘mankind’ for its ‘welfare’ by human nature or ‘divine ordinance.’” Drawing upon the universalism of classical philosophy, Grotius imagined a world of independent nation-states governed by moral law as codified in legal form. His ideas were later taken up as a kind of shallow canon by many people who promoted a juridical and institutionalized international system. Yet positing a coherent foundation for a “Grotian tradition” seems unwarranted. In The Law of War and Peace, Book II, Grotius argued not for a universal political framework encompassing diverse and sometimes mutually hostile societies, but rather for joint actions and alliances to combat “the enemies of Christendom.” Treaties could be concluded with the “impious,” but not in a way that weakened moral solidarity among Christian nations. Thus he brought the contradictions of universalism into the early modern era.
• Living amidst the violence of a disintegrated moral order, and on the cusp of a more settled system of nation-states tolerating confessional differences, Grotius contemplated a “society of states” and a “common good of an international nature.” He is perhaps emblematic of a syndrome that echoes repeatedly in the history of the West. In his writings we see how the spiritual unive salism of Christendom found expression in visions of societies joined together not by common beliefs but by hollowed-out legal rules. Europeans had been thrown out of the Garden. The love of morality that Leo Strauss found in “closed societies” gave way o sociological abstractions and legal positivism.
• Grotius died in 1645, but his notion of an “international society” made up of sovereign states took rudimentary form after the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, a complex settlement that established principles for an interstate order in Central Europe. It defined the borders of numerous states and clarified which laws applied to many people who had hitherto lived under ambiguous rule. Grotius had not fleshed out “solidarist” principles like those that are manifest in the United Nations and regional intergovernmental organizations today, but he did provide a framework upon which they would eventually be hung. He took intellectual steps oward an international system composed of states but intended to constrain them, imposing on their sovereignty on behalf of individual rights.
• Hersch Lauterpacht linked Grotius to the emerging project of an international bill of rights in 1946, writing that the Dutch jurist had envisioned a society of mankind, not simply a society of states; a society in which “the individual possessed fundamental rights and freedoms and was not merely an object.” This is likely a romanticized interpretation. The Westphalian model esse tially painted international society as an association of states. “Modern international law,” writes Martii Koskenniemi, “was born from a defense of secular absolutism against theology and feudalism. The international world became an extension of sovereign rule.” But the ideal of a deeper unity persisted, taking on a secular tone. “After Westphalia, noted Norman Davies, “people who could no longer bear to talk of ‘Christendom’ began to talk instead of ‘Europe.’” Indeed, it was the origin of a “messianic or utopian idea of Europe.”
• The Treaty of Westphalia brought peace between adversaries that were deeply exhausted, proclaiming a “Christian and Universal Peace, and a perpetual one” in its first article. It obliged signatories to resist all aggression, and was thus a forerunner of collective security treaties like the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). It did not end war, but it brought moral pressure on would-be aggressors.
• In its ambition to bind sovereign and independent states to common standards but with no overarching authority or power of enforcement, the treaty served as a rudimentary model for future multinational agreements aimed at promoting compliance with moral standards. These agreements are filled with utopian expectations, crippling contradictions, and a tendency to water down principles in order to dodge their application.
• The Westphalian model of international cooperation can help reduce interstate violence and promote peace, but individual liber y is a different goal. The ideal of liberty gained clarity and support after the Westphalian model had already become entrenched. When that model is burdened with the task of transforming the internal practices of sovereign states to protect human rights, consistent with moral universalism, it not only fails, but corrodes the principle of individual liberty. In the United Nations system today, unity, peace and “stability” have too often been enemies of human rights and freedoms.
• Chapter 3 Universal Natural Rights and Sovereign Particularity
• Early efforts to promulgate secular international law were focused on regulating the conduct of nations in war. Drawing on a moral tradition that called upon nations to act in harmony with each other, this movement proposed laws to establish when war is justified and to civilize the conduct of war, consistent with Christian principles that would provide the basis for international consensus. These initiatives embodied the idea that moral universals are to be realized through international law and intergovernmental agreements in a top-down process. They were a big step in the development of the institutionalist outlook that informs international human rights today.
• Paradoxically, the moral core of today’s concept of human rights emerged most clearly from another orientation altogether. This philosophy of natural rights asserted the sanctity and universality of inherent individual rights, but held that no transnational body has the authority to define or enforce a nation’s ethical standards. This “realist” perspective is now associated with skepticism toward international institutions and resistance to international law as a way of promoting human rights. It favors a bottom-up approach, starting with the individual, the exercise of reason, and government by consent, to realize universal human rights in particular places. This concept was revolutionary when it appeared, although it had roots in classical Greek insights about the diversity of human societies and the distribution of reason within them, as against the idealization of global uni y that has seduced thinkers since the Hellenistic age. According to natural rights realism, a centralized international order lacks any moral foundation, and is thus a threat to individual freedom and national sovereignty.
• While the Thirty Years’ War was raging on the European continent, Thomas Hobbes worked on his translation of Thucydides’ Histo y of the Peloponnesian War, published in 1628. It was the first direct translation into English of a text from the original Greek. In Thucydides, Hobbes found confirmation of his own ideas about the nature of man and the reality of power politics, as well as a new perspective; all of his political writings are “saturated” with ideas from the Greek historian. Thucydides “apparently crystallized for Hobbes many of the ideas fundamental to his later political philosophy, including those in his most influential work, Leviathan, published in 1651.”
• Hobbes is generally regarded as a counterpoint to Hugo Grotius in thinking about international relations. Rather than imagining nation-states being constrained by an overarching system of laws, Hobbes understood nation-states as independent and always self-interested. He believed that political theories needed to be based on how people actually behave, not on how they ought to behave in accordance with any higher law. Rather than promoting harmony among nations, the idea of law standing above sovereign rulers had the opposite effect. Leo Strauss characterized the views of Hobbes as political atheism or hedonism, a kind of dogmatism based on skepticism and distrust. Hobbes understood the character of societies and their behavior toward each other to reflect man’s animal nature, rather than soul or spirit. Like Thucydides, he formed his political theories around the unchanging realities of human nature everywhere, and he recognized the basic motives for human behavior as fear, desire for profit, and love of honor (Leviathan, chap. 13).
• Yet, Hobbes, who drove a stake into the heart of theories that lent support to intergovernmental unity based on natural law, is also thought to have launched the modern human rights tradition by “transforming classical natural law into modern natural rights.” In Chapter 14 of Leviathan, he identified a natural right to security against the dangers posed by others: the right that each person has for the “preservation of his own nature.” Given the natural and universal qualities of mankind, conflict is natural and universal. “Without a common power to keep them in awe,” wrote Hobbes, men are basically at “war” with one another. Unless the natural human propensities to conflict are restrained, domestic tranquility is impossible and individuals live in a state of constant insecurity. Hobbes believed that a strong Leviathan state was the only alternative to a condition in which natural enmity and violence made enjoyment of the natural right to security impossible. The right to security implied a claim to protection from aggression, which gave legitimacy to the coercive power of the state.
• No analogy was suggested between individuals needing a protective government, and states voluntarily coming under an overarchi g global authority for their security. Hobbes believed that states necessarily exist in a natural condition of competition and even hostility toward one another, like individuals in a state of nature. Nothing in his writings suggests a global Leviathan that could constrain the behavior of states, which are independent in ways that individuals are not. Humans are of necessity social, as per Aristotle’s well-known insights. The human necessity of accommodating to group life for survival means adhering to norms. But Hobbes saw international relations as intrinsically anarchic, in essence a perpetual state of declared or de facto war. He thus defenestrated the comforting notion of man’s natural “sociability” animating and civilizing international relations. Hobbes did not propose a foundation for transnational communitarianism, instead painting a picture of the world at odds with any plan to project the values of civilized society onto international relations. But he welcomed alliances or leagues for common defense. While a defensive league of citizens within a state poses a threat to sovereign power, “Leagues between Commonwealths, over whom there is no humane Power established, to keep them all in awe, are not only lawful, but also profitable for the time hey last” (Leviathan, chap. 22).
• Although Hobbes offered no support to any proposal for global political authority, some scholars have tried to place him withi the “Grotian tradition” that promotes rule of law at the international level. By implication or extension, the argument goes, Hobbes laid the theoretical foundation for an institutionalized, global security order. But in fact he regarded the state as responsible for guaranteeing the natural right of individuals to security. Hobbes is considered the forefather of a “realist” school that doubts the ability of international bodies to guarantee either security or liberty. Hans Morgenthau, a major exponent o the Hobbesian perspective, argued in Politics Among Nations that international relations are subject to no higher law than power politics, that “universal moral principles cannot be applied to the actions of states in their abstract universal formulatio .” The only ways to restrain state power are either from within or by the actions of stronger states. Similarly, David Fromkin wrote in The Independence of Nations that “law … is to be found within nations, not above them.” People may be communal by natu e, but states are necessarily independent. Fromkin’s penetrating book about international relations hardly mentions the United Nations or the principle of human rights.
• In modern times, the Hobbesian idea of an inherent right to security has been perverted into a justification for state repression. For example, the Chinese Communist Party invoked the “right to security” to account for its persecution of the Uyghur population in Xinjiang. A journalist wrote in The Diplomat magazine:
• As for the human right to “security,” another common refrain from Beijing … is that its actions in Xinjiang are a justified response to terrorist activity. Chinese authorities counter accusations of rights violations by pointing out that there have been no terrorist attacks in Xinjiang since 2017, and that providing this human right to security is worth whatever cost it may carry in the Western sense of human rights—for example, freedom of speech, religion, and association. By promoting a redefinition of human rights to include economic and physical security, China is essentially hoping to shift the goalposts so it can better compete with the liberal democracies (and particularly the United States) for the moral high ground of human rights protection.
• Anyone who has witnessed life under overbearing state power knows the deep insecurity it inculcates. Societies are more secure when citizens enjoy civil and political rights, even if respecting those rights generates the disorder intrinsic to pluralism. The signatories to the Helsinki Accords of 1975, a political set of agreements, affirmed the principle that human rights and security are interlinked. Threats to human rights, in particular the rights of minorities, are threats to security that generate tensions between neighbors.
• The modern Hobbesian state tends toward a proliferation of “public administrative law” in an “administrative state” where regulations designed to achieve goods considered essential aspects of security can expand without constitutional constraint. When the “right to security” is expanded to a global scale through the United Nations, it implies a global Leviathan to ensure security. For example, despotic regimes have claimed the necessities of security in pushing international legislation to combat cybercrime. Barbora Bukovska, a human rights activist, warned that the proposed treaty would threaten the freedom of expression:
• The current international effort around a new treaty … raises serious human rights concerns. It was first spearheaded in 2019 y Russia and gained support from, among others, China, Cambodia, Belarus, Iran and Venezuela—hardly champions of human rights, online or offline. It has quickly become clear that some states intend to use the process to push for expansion of state power o control and criminalise a broad range of online speech.
• In fact, many of the aspects of the proposed new treaty follow a trend of restrictive cybercrime laws around the world. From Tunisia to Thailand, cybercrime laws are routinely subject to abuse, and used to attack freedom of expression, undermine privacy, and exert greater control over people’s legitimate online activities.
• The root purpose of international institutions in the UN framework is to preserve international peace and security, with human rights as a moral backdrop, but these are often conflicting goals. Freedom-abusing regimes are especially preoccupied with their own stability. Claiming to speak on behalf of the societies they control, these regimes assert a “right” to self-preservation, which they use as an argument against any international standards or agreements deemed to threaten the security of the regime. In the international state of nature, however, there is no power that bears the duty to protect a right of regime self-preservation. A government that protects political freedom elevates the inherent rights of citizens over its own security and puts its preservation in their hands. Protecting the natural rights of individuals to both security and liberty gives legitimacy to the state, while permitting public debate about their proper balance.
• International human rights have evolved in a way that obscures the distinction between regimes that respect liberty and those hat deny it. This blurring discourages political reform in the direction of freedom and natural rights. Within a global legal framework set up to protect “peace and security,” the principle of liberty too often falls by the wayside.
• Whereas Hobbes viewed the wars of the seventeenth century as a lesson on the state’s duty to guarantee a natural right to secu ity, John Locke (1632–1704) drew a different conclusion. In those conflicts he found evidence that a state’s legitimacy rests on its ability to guarantee individual freedom and tolerate political and religious pluralism. Locke’s political philosophy was highly influential in colonial America, leading one contemporary exegete to call him “America’s philosopher, our king in the way a philosopher has ever been king of a great nation.” Professor Nathan Tarcov observed that Locke “stands at the source of [the American] tradition.” Locke established a revolutionary foundation for the priority of securing universal, natural rights, and like Hobbes he saw the nation-state as responsible for guarding the rights of citizens.
• Locke wrote his Second Treatise of Civil Government as “a demand for a revolution” to achieve government by consent, the defense of natural rights, and moral equality. He built his argument for basic rights and freedoms as an empiricist and a rationalist. His analysis drew upon the particularities of English history, but also involved a thought experiment to determine how civil government came about in the first place.
• Over the centuries, a body of positive law had accreted under English common law, as judges identified the rights of individuals against one another and against the Crown itself. These “rights of Englishmen,” according to tradition, had their source in an “ancient constitution” formed from laws and customs brought to England by the Saxons in the early Middle Ages. Centuries late , the Magna Carta and subsequent bills of rights were seen as simply reinstating the rights that Englishmen had enjoyed in the pre-Norman period, which was idealized as an agrarian paradise.
• Locke recast this tradition of an ancient English constitution as a story of the emerging recognition of natural rights that a e innate to all people. He began by imagining a prepolitical condition in which individuals all have “perfect freedom” and equality. No one is inherently subject to the will of anyone else, and all people live without “a common superior on earth, with the authority to judge between them.” In this state of nature, freedom is not absolute, but constrained by a universal law of nature that is accessible by reason, a universal human capacity. The law of reason “teaches all mankind … that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty or possessions” (Second Treatise II.6).
• In his thought experiment, Locke essentially stripped humanity of the conventions that furnish our images of human society, to arrive at a state of nature. He then constructed a political society upon its irreducible element, the reasoning individual, who is guided by a law of nature that precedes all other laws and traditions.
• Locke, unlike Hobbes, identified man as a creation of God, as “His property,” gifted with the freedom to make choices and the ational capacity to make moral choices informed by natural law. The problem is that not all people exercise their reason to make morally sound and coherent choices. In the state of nature, some individuals will impinge upon the freedom of others and usurp their control of their own lives (which Locke saw as a form of property). These actions are violations of natural law.
• The law of nature provides no sanctions against those who cannot or will not follow it, but all people have a natural right to protect themselves and others from transgressions of natural law that threaten their lives and their freedom. “[E]very Man hath a Right to punish the Offender, and be Executioner of the Law of Nature,” wrote Locke. He did not approve of vigilantism because “it is unreasonable for Men to be Judges in their own Cases,” since “Self-love will make Men partial to themselves and their Friends” (II.13). In the state of nature, however, reason can guide people to harmonize their individual self-defense in accordance with natural law and form a peaceful civil society that honors this law. Civil government based on consent is the “proper remedy” for the “Inconveniences of the State of Nature.”
• If the original purpose of civil government is betrayed, it amounts to a betrayal of God’s purpose in endowing man with moral choice. In that case, changing the government, even by force, is natural and legitimate. Locke’s idea of civil society as being founded to protect natural rights is not a utopian vision, but suggests a pragmatic way of reconciling individual freedom and the demands of life in community with others.
• The idea of natural law that had animated monarchies and empires as well as Christendom was law based on God’s commands, which brought moral and political order to the world through universal laws and institutions. In Locke’s philosophy, natural law is a moral law grasped by reason. All people have an innate capacity for rational judgment in varying measures, which enables them o discern natural law, understand their natural rights, and acknowledge the limits of freedom. Reason moves people to institute civil government by consent, for the purpose of protecting individual rights. Locke’s central idea concerning the origins of civil government has implications for the question of states protecting natural rights beyond their own jurisdiction, and for efforts to institutionalize human rights on an international scale.
• Today, the protection of universal human rights can hardly be imagined apart from international law and institutions. Modern liberalism has come to reject the idea that human rights are best protected by constitutional nation-states, the very existence of which is sometimes considered antithetical to universal rights. Instead, liberal internationalism has shifted responsibility or securing rights to a supranational entity, making the nation nothing but an “administrative unit” for implementing transnational standards and regulations.
• America’s Founders and early nineteenth-century leaders saw things differently. They had read Locke and Montesquieu, and they harbored a deep distaste for the papacy and for Old World empires. It can be assumed that they would have regarded proposals for transnational institutions and legal structures for implementing moral universals as counterintuitive and retrograde.
• Locke advocated protecting inherent rights not by forging intersocietal political unity to represent and realize the obligatio s of universality, but by honoring the obligations of natural rights and natural law in one’s particular government. In fact, Locke was what many today would pejoratively call a “nationalist.” He saw himself as a citizen of England, not a “citizen of the world.”
• According to Professor Jeremy Rabkin, Locke’s liberalism was inseparable from his nationalism, with none of the hostility to the nation that is found in modern liberal internationalism. Whereas Hugo Grotius, being mainly concerned about peace and community, had envisioned an “international society” built over the decaying remains of Christendom, Locke’s central commitment to natural rights led him to focus on the nation and its conventions as necessary to protecting them. He saw the establishment of a civil society as a way to safeguard rights. “Fencing themselves off as a nation, makes it possible for people to choose representatives and erect a ‘fence to their properties,’” as Rabkin explained. Our rights and freedoms are precious properties. Freedom is fragile and must be cultivated in a sheltered place, within a national fence protecting internal fences that safeguard individual rights. Freedom depends on borders—around the nation, and around the individual’s zone of personal freedom and choice.
• Locke did not suggest any transnational formations either to defend universal natural rights or to mitigate conflict between s ates. The international order is composed of societies necessarily independent of one another. When he referred to traditions and bonds of civil society, he emphasized the deep differences between societies. In the absence of common traditions, social bo ds, or a common authority, “international society” is not a society at all. It is a state of nature, where members are “judges and executioners” in their own cases. An international civil society would not be analogous to a political society of individuals entering into a contractual agreement, because it would consist of distinct communities, many of which were not formed on a rational basis consistent with moral law. There could be no meaningful common laws, no impartial rules, no social contract with a consensual delegation of authority.
• Locke never proposed any initiative to civilize the state of nature that is international society, nor suggested a world organization to adjudicate competing natural rights claims. He understood that no civil society could be built without a supreme authority, a centralization of power, something that cannot be reproduced in the international sphere.
• Emer de Vattel, a Swiss jurist, expressed a similar view in Le Droit des gens (The Law of Nations), an influential treatise published in 1758. He wrote that distinct political societies live in a state of nature with each other. To understand the laws that govern their behavior, we need to understand how independent bodies behave toward one another in the state of nature, as sovereign political communities without a political superior.
• For some, especially progressives, Locke’s silence on the matter of an international civil society was a failure and a disappointment. For example, in his introduction to a 1947 edition of The Two Treatises of Government, Thomas I. Cook lamented that Locke had “failed to argue for the need for a supranational organization,” and that his “sinister divorce of natural law from universalism and even from international law was prophetic of the foreign relations of constitutional states.”
• While Locke did not entertain visions of institutionalized human rights universalism, he did believe in the obligation of free people to support the freedom and survival of people in other societies where rulers abused natural law and natural rights (II.6). In the international state of nature, without any overarching authority, states in principle have “the same power to punish breaches of the natural law in the international community that individuals have in the state of nature,” as the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy explains it. “This would legitimize, for example, punishment of individuals for war crimes or crimes against humanity even in cases where neither the laws of the particular state nor international law authorize punishment.”
• As a defender of universal natural rights, Locke did not shy away from the idea of a state intervening in other societies to defend natural law. He believed that sovereign nations have a moral duty to take action against states that violate the law of nature, just as individuals have a moral duty to come to the assistance of other individuals in their own society who are threate ed. Sovereign states should punish other states when they subjugate individuals or other societies against their will, when they “live by another rule than that of reason and common equity, which is that measure God has set to the actions of men, for their mutual security” (II.8).
• For Locke, the natural law that is accessible by universal reason and moral judgment remains transcendent and uncompromised; i stays moral, out of the realm of legal rationalization and intergovernmental legal politics. He could thus condone interventions to defend natural rights in other societies without making natural law a template for codified global law and morally vacuous cosmopolitanism. Natural law as conceived by Locke retained its moral substance and charisma as an idea that gave birth to free, liberal democracies, starting with the United States of America.
• While the iron logic of John Locke established the philosophical foundation for protecting liberty as the primary legitimation of civil governments, the text most widely cited by the Founders was The Spirit of the Laws, the magisterial work published in 1748 by Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu. The centrality of the separation of powers and the rule of law in the U.S. Constitution owes much to Montesquieu, but his influence went beyond constitutional principles. As a pioneer in the science of comparative politics, he showed how liberty requires a basis in the political culture of a society. The American colonists embraced the principle of natural rights because they were accustomed to freedoms rooted in British common law, in a place where the king’s power was attenuated by distance and the unique conditions of life in the New World. The political culture of the colonies prepared the ground for a revolution in the defense of natural rights.
• Montesquieu did not expound a theory of natural rights, but his observations about laws arising from cultural particularities influenced how Americans of the founding generation thought about opposing the tyranny they saw in European monarchies. He noted that despotic regimes do not have actual laws, but rather “manners and customs” (XIX.12). A foreign power could not simply install a democratic form of government to liberate a subjugated population with any success, because liberalization could not take hold without a change in manners and customs. Imposing “alien and ill-fitting institutions” on a nation from outside would impinge on the feeling of liberty, which depended on a sense of security, where there was no abuse of power (XI.4). What was needed was to project the “spirit” of liberty and “engage the people to make the change themselves” (XIX.14). A change in culture must precede a change in laws. Indeed, Montesquieu may have been an inspiration for Antonio Gramsci’s strategy for imposing socialism by first changing cultural preferences.
• Montesquieu seems not to have contemplated a system of international law to govern the protection of rights, but he did descrie a “law of nations” as a set of customary practices “relating to all societies” as regards their “mutual intercourse,” which is accepted as a law of nature. The core principle of this law is that “different nations ought in time of peace to do one another all the good they can, and in time of war as little injury as possible, without prejudicing their real interests”(I.2). Montesquieu, like Hobbes and Locke, understood that any law among nations must be concerned primarily with preventing warfare, or a least making it more humane.
• Montesquieu’s liberal political philosophy possesses “in-built sources of resistance to the rationalistic and universalistic political projects often associated with modern liberalism,” writes Professor Keegan Callahan. It holds a “warning against an attempt to force all nations into the same mold,” against seeking uniformity in the effort to achieve moral “perfection” (XXIX.18). The study of Montesquieu thus helped American and other early reformers avoid the temptation of human rights imperialism and utopian intergovernmental schemes.
• The first American leaders approached the promotion of universal human rights in the spirit of John Locke’s rational universalism tempered by Montesquieu’s prudential political science. Thomas Jefferson, for example, often spoke in universalistic terms and praised certain policies for their “benefit to mankind,” but his political ideal was a world of separate democracies, not a universal order under one governing body. His concept of the law of nations was similar to Montesquieu’s: a moral law stipulating that the duties between one society and another are the same as those between individuals.
• The moral foundation of the Founders’ human rights strategy was intrinsic to the political philosophy that drove their revolution. They harbored a largely Calvinist skepticism toward religious and political authorities, and a wariness of empires and confederacies and of Catholic intergovernmental structures. As Jeremy Rabkin explained,
• The Federalist looked at confederacies, with members linked only by agreements among the governments, as holdovers from (or counterparts to) feudal institutions, lacking the strength of governments founded in the direct consent of the governed. Publius derided the “Germanic empire” of the time, a surviving relic of the medieval Holy Roman Empire, as still resting on “laws … add essed to sovereigns” (the princely member states) and “a nerveless body, incapable of regulating its own members, insecure against external dangers, and agitated with unceasing fermentations in its own bowels.”
• Along the same lines, Federalist No. 15 called for placing “little reliance” on treaties, which depend entirely on “the obliga ions of good faith.”
• American leaders of the revolutionary generation had studied and internalized the principles of liberty and republicanism, and the way that societies can change their laws. In the Bible and in the works of Locke and Montesquieu, they had found “not a blueprint for a government that existed only the minds of ideologues,” but rather “broad principles for what [had] been growing organically in America for over 150 years.”
• The revolutionary leaders did not all follow the same literary influences. Jefferson was “thoroughly steeped in Enlightenment literature,” notes Jonathan Israel, but he detested both Locke and Montesquieu (despite echoing many of their ideas), ignored Rousseau (not surprisingly), and was deeply influenced by Thomas Paine. While classical learning pervaded the writings of some Founders, Paine famously said that he read little and “thought for himself.” Key aspects of his thinking, however, clearly track with ideas about universal human nature found in Hobbes and Locke. None of the most philosophically influential Founders seem o have taken their ideas from any one particular source. All drew from a variety of thinkers, ancient and contemporary, to arrive at viewpoints that were often very different from one another.
• Alongside Locke’s revolutionary thesis, the study of Montesquieu instilled an anti-utopian prudence. Observing that the laws o a society reflect its culture and mores, Montesquieu cautioned against trying to make all nations conform to the same ideal of perfection. His thought has been characterized as “relativist” because he emphasized cultural differences and refrained from judging societies and regimes on the basis of objective moral standards. But he saw a universal potential for achieving cultural and political change in the direction of liberty through moral discourse, appealing to the rational capacity to grasp universals and natural law. Given their many references to Montesquieu as well as Locke, we can infer that Americans of the revolutionary generation would have regarded the idea of global human rights legislation as utopian.
• American politics before, during, and after the revolutionary war were driven by deeply divergent attitudes toward democracy a d republican governance. The Republicans, associated with Thomas Jefferson, campaigned for a smaller, less intrusive federal government, the abolition of all aristocratic and class privileges, and maximum civil liberties. The Federalists, linked to Alexa der Hamilton, wanted a society that retained much of Britain’s social and political structure. They did not envision the United States being a model for a global revolution for freedom. Jefferson, in an often-quoted letter, characterized the Federalists as “timid men who prefer the calm of despotism to the tempestuous sea of liberty.” 
• History shows that securing freedom required disruptive personalities like Thomas Paine and Samuel Adams—morally uncorruptible “rabble-rousers” who (like Diogenes) were not afraid to challenge conventions on the basis of abstract ideas. Adams was prepared to use extralegal methods to launch the revolution, though later on he was preoccupied with maintaining a virtuous citizenry. Paine saw himself as a “missionary for liberty,” while others viewed him as “monomaniacal … incapable of accepting the dangerous consequences of revolution.” Acting only on principle, unburdened by political responsibility, resistant to compromise, he seems to be a model for Max Weber’s depiction of the political figure driven by Gesinnungsethik, an “ethic of moral conviction.” Paine disparaged President Washington for doing too little to spread the revolution abroad; he wrote, in Rights of Man, that “my country is the World, and my religions is to do good.” His writings suggest a form of determinism, in which the universality of reason made change toward democracy inevitable. The embrace of the “universal abstraction of man” meant that universality was destiny; the principle of inherent natural rights must, by its rootedness in nature and reason, eventually be universally adopted.
• The 1790s were perhaps the most politically divided time in American history other than the decade leading up to the Civil War, and this period established the political character of the new country as a place where fundamental principles and questions are always up for debate. Then as now, America’s approach to spreading the message of liberty and promoting freedom abroad was ambivalent. Leaders gave mixed signals about the universality of the message contained in the Declaration of Independence.
• In the wake of the French Revolution, widespread opinion held that its animating principles were fundamentally different from hose that inspired the American Revolution. This conclusion represented a retreat from the universalism of Paine and Jefferson. The irreligious or antireligious ideology of the French Revolution offended deeply Christian Americans, who saw their own revolution as being guided by biblical ethics. The mass bloodshed in revolutionary France hardened the Federalists’ disregard for the prospects of global democratic upheaval, and some backed reactionary responses to revolutionary uprisings elsewhere, such as he Dutch Provinces. Timothy Pickering, the secretary of state in the administration of President John Adams, worked against the Haitian revolution that had been inspired mainly by the one in France. Pickering even tried to engineer a scheme for reuniting some New England states with Britain.
• Jefferson’s enthusiasm for the French Revolution was only somewhat diminished by the Terror, though by 1795 he repudiated the “atrocities of Robespierre.” The Terror reinforced his belief that “democracy only works when the people are sufficiently enlightened and informed,” as Montesquieu had taught.
• American political leaders, as well as influential members of civil society like Thomas Paine, almost unanimously denounced coercive and exploitive hereditary monarchies. They saw their revolution not only as a war for independence, but also as part of a larger movement for reform. Many outsiders saw it the same way. Richard Price, a British reformer, said that the American Revolution began “a new era in the history of mankind.” It established “an empire which may be the seat of liberty, science and virtue, and from whence there is reason to hope these sacred blessings will spread, till they become universal.” According to Rober Nisbet, who studied “the idea of progress,” America was widely understood as “a kind of redeemer in the process of historical development,” the bearer of an “American millennialism” that extended into a broad spectrum of social thought and was an extension of the “explosive nationalisms” that attended the Protestant Reformation.
• By proclaiming independence and forming a sovereign nation based on self-governance, the American Founders recognized that they were also acting on behalf of freedom elsewhere. They believed that their revolution was universally relevant because it emerged from the common human nature that Americans shared with all other people. They did not make an appeal to class consciousness or aim to improve material conditions. Their battle was for liberty—for themselves and for those they influenced beyond America’s shores.
• The Founders did not follow a systematic policy or a programmatic method for promoting freedom, but acted upon a moral impulse. They advanced the cause of liberty by their rhetoric and the immediacy of their actions. The American Revolution stood as a fact, projecting an idea and a spirit with greater impact than any distinct government policy could have had. Americans promoted reedom by being free themselves. They did not advocate a uniform global order, but instead hoped that their example would serve to increase the number of societies that honored natural rights. They appealed to universal principles in the “language of Ame ican liberty,” which Benjamin Franklin called the “voice of Philosophy.” 
• The American Revolution has often been described as a “spark” for a wider movement toward liberty and human rights. Jefferson called it a “signal of arousing men to burst the chains … of ignorance and superstition … and to assume the blessings of self-government.” It was as “an instrument pregnant with the fate of the world.” The idea of the Revolution was an agent of change, i spiring a series of national movements to promote basic political rights by changing oppressive regimes. It was the American ideal of freedom that lit up the world. By 1826, when Jefferson made his observation about the global impact of the Declaration, he document “had already been joined by some twenty other declarations of independence from Europe, the Caribbean, and Spanish America.” Now, more than half of the world’s countries have achieved sovereignty through such declarations.
• The early Americans did not favor direct intervention to promote democratic revolutions elsewhere. America’s first foreign policy was firmly noninterventionist. To the Federalist faction, intervening in a struggle for freedom elsewhere was neither practical nor moral. This view was also broadly shared by Republicans. In the wars between Britain and France, the Federalists sympathized with Britain because of their lingering suspicions about democracy and their belief that a stable social order depended on hierarchy, while the Republicans favored France, whose revolution had been profoundly influenced by their own ideas. But the oficial policy of the United States was neutrality, a policy that had unanimous support in President Washington’s cabinet.
• Washington famously argued against “foreign entanglements” and “alliances” in his Farewell Address (actually a letter) of 179, where he said, “The great rule of conduct for us, in regard to foreign nations, is in extending our commercial relations, to have with them as little political connection as possible.” Jefferson, in his first inaugural address (1801), likewise called or “peace, commerce, and honest friendship, with all nations” but “entangling alliances with none.”
• At the same time, Jefferson believed that America should be a place of “asylum” for “oppressed humanity” and “unhappy fugitives,” as he remarked in his first address to Congress. Earlier, as secretary of state, he argued that any extradition treaty should make exceptions for certain categories of crime, including treason. Granting that “real” treason “merits the highest punishme t,” Jefferson noted that most criminal codes “do not distinguish between acts against the government and acts against the oppressions of the government.” The latter are virtuous, he said, but result in more executions than the former, “because real treasons are rare, oppressions frequent. The unsuccessful strugglers against tyranny have been the chief martyrs of treason laws in all countries.” The patriot who tries to reform his government but fails should not be handed over to the executioner.
• James Monroe was an “apostle” of the American Revolution and of what he called a “spirit of liberty.” Though dedicated to inspiring democracy and freedom abroad, he echoed Washington and Jefferson in cautioning against foreign entanglements. The Monroe Doctrine of 1823, inspired largely by the writings of Thomas Paine, supported the independence of former Spanish colonies and wa ned European powers against any further attempts to subjugate parts of the Western Hemisphere. But it did not set forth a policy of military confrontation beyond saying, “it is only when our rights are invaded or seriously menaced that we resent injuries or make preparation for our defense.”
• In the early decades of the nineteen century, ruling powers quelled popular movements for democracy in Italy, Spain and Greece that had taken inspiration from the American Revolution. The United States did not intervene in these conflicts, but promoted fundamental political rights abroad by its ideas and example.
• In order to establish laws in harmony with human universals, the Founders sought national independence, which “implies national distinctiveness and difference.” They created a particular place for the enjoyment of universal rights. At the same time, their experience of imperial repression and the sacrifices needed to throw it off inspired a moral commitment to advancing freedom and equality beyond their own borders. Their ideas and example could undermine tyranny and help move other political systems into accord with reason and natural law.
• While the American Revolution was still being fought, Jefferson referred to an “empire of liberty.” He foresaw an expansion of the new nation’s territory on the American continent, which he was later able to accomplish with the Louisiana Purchase. Government policies in the early nineteenth century often betrayed the ideal of liberty, especially in the forcible displacement of Native Americans while settlers pushed westward. But Jefferson did not envision the “empire of liberty” as an amalgamation of diverse nations governed by a central authority. He understood liberty as a good that could be attained only through national sove eignty and self-governance.
• America’s Founders thus expressed a modest form of human rights universalism that had both idealistic and pragmatic dimensions. American leaders sought economic relations with other societies as something beneficial to citizens and conducive to world peace, while they unreservedly denounced aristocratic privilege, monarchical rule, and the repression of individual rights and freedoms. Their approach to liberalizing other societies was to appeal to the universal capacity for moral reason, so that the wise, being receptive to the idea of universal natural rights, might form vanguards to nurture a culture of liberty as the learned American revolutionaries had done.
• American leaders had internalized lessons from their intellectual and religious inheritance about the dangers of attempting to bring moral order to the world through centralized intergovernmental institutions. They had studied the history of ancient empires and a bureaucratized Christianity. They recognized the folly of trying to impose a single model of society everywhere. Give the “imperfections, weaknesses and evils incident to society,” wrote Alexander Hamilton in Federalist No. 6, it was time to awake from the “deceitful dream” of a “happy empire of perfect wisdom and perfect virtue.” The Founders were inspired by a philosophy of natural law understood as the law of reason, which leads individuals to know their natural rights and the constraints on liberty that civil society requires. They drew upon John Locke’s concept of natural law as the foundation of civil society, along with Montesquieu’s insights on the relationship between law and culture.
• A different strain of Enlightenment rationalism drove a project to achieve international harmony on universal rights. This app oach would focus on building the power of both national and international legal institutions to shape society, rather than limiting the state’s interference in the choices of individuals. It would aim to achieve global conformity with a priori model of a international society that honors human rights, rather than a spontaneous harmony emerging from the common recognition of natural rights. This philosophy has resulted in embedding the protection of human rights in processes that are hostile to natural rights, and it has made contemporary human rights institutions largely dysfunctional.
• Chapter 4 Toward the Institutionalization of Universal Human Rights
• There is no more potent symbol of the appropriation of moral universality by global institutions than the United Nations Headquarters in New York City. The towering structure that houses the UN Secretariat is an example of the “international style,” a form of architectural modernism that emphasizes volume, with minimal ornamentation. It is a building meant to envelop a vast space while standing outside any particular culture or tradition. Like the great medieval cathedrals of Europe and the grandiose monuments of empires, it dwarfs the individual person—not before God or the state, but before the all-encompassing “international community.”
• The room where the UN General Assembly meets is located in an adjoining building and resembles a lecture hall. A hemicycle of seats faces a massive metallic form in the center, unadorned except for the totemic emblem of the United Nations: a representation of the Earth surrounded by olive branches symbolizing peace. The grotesque pagan altar evokes a universal religion organized around collective self-worship. UN delegations meet in a space implying reverence of their all-encompassing unity, embodied in the institution and its supranational laws and processes.
• The UN presents itself as a sort of universal church where man has replaced God and international law has replaced natural law. It calls to mind the functionalist understanding of religion articulated in the nineteenth century by Emile Durkheim, many of whose theories have become foundational doctrines in modern sociology. Durkheim characterized religion is a “social fact” whose “function” is to impress upon the individual his dependence on society, and to suppress individualism and egoism. The objects of religious worship are symbols of society itself. While Durkheim’s research found high suicide rates resulting from individuation in Protestantism, he identified organized, institutional religion as a source of social integration and mental health. The idea of the church “conveys the notion that religion must be an eminently collective thing.” Durkheim’s reductionist understandi g of religion is similar to the concept of natural law advanced around the same time by Ferdinand Tönnies, a founder of sociology in Germany. Tönnies held that natural law is nothing but a social construct; that society itself—not nature, reason, or the Divine—established natural law.
• The Western philosophical tradition has no unitary conception of natural law, as we have seen; there are both theologically and rationally based concepts, with some overlap between them. But all are universalistic by definition, and concepts of universalism are ways of thinking about natural law. Universalism is “the most enduring feature of natural law.” Though references to na ural law and natural rights are now almost completely absent from the discourse of international human rights, the idea of natural law is what engendered the project of international humanitarian and human rights law. Beliefs and assumptions about natural law, both explicit and implicit, have given form to international human rights institutions. These varied and sometimes incompatible assumptions lie mostly beneath the surface of intergovernmental efforts to achieve consensus among differing visions of universality.
• The philosophy of natural rights, which clarified the individual’s civil and political rights, emerged in the context of Renaissance humanism’s interest in classical reason as the North Star for individual development, and the Reformation’s insistence on unmediated communion with God and rejection of institutionalized universalism. Modern human rights institutions, on the other hand, grew out of a collectivist orientation that reflects a strain of Enlightenment rationalism along with the Catholic natural law tradition of setting forth universal moral standards to guide transnational formations. In addition, the progressivism of he nineteenth and early twentieth centuries also fostered the rationalization of natural law universalism that now characterizes international human rights.
• The liberalism of the American Revolution was centered on the principle of natural rights, tempered by the empirical observation that the embrace of liberty must begin within a society’s political culture. The Americans’ example and their language of freedom inspired other uprisings against coercive regimes. But the French Revolution took human rights in a different direction and manifested the dark, statist, and totalitarian potential of Enlightenment rationalism. It instigated a movement toward the global institutionalization of human rights, which has often frustrated the kind of political liberalization that serves freedom.
• The universalizing aims of the French Revolution might be seen as a product of France’s historic status as the “elder daughter of the Church.” From its privileged relationship with the Catholic Church, wrote Naomi Schor, France drew its “founding reputation and mission as a disseminator of a universalist creed.” Then, the Revolution destroyed the Church and replaced it with the State as the custodian of universalism. “The history of universalism in France” thus represents “the transvaluation of a fundamental religious belief into the prime means of desacralizing society.” Removing the Church from society, however, turned society into a church, and one no less intolerant of individualism or national sovereignty. Universalism demanded the assimilation of minorities (still a sore point in France), as a self-proclaimed majority had “pre-empted universality.” The citizen, an “abstract rights-bearing individual,” would be free to practice personal beliefs privately, but public assimilation was the condition of enjoying human rights.
• While the American revolutionaries hoped for the transformation of other societies and encouraged it by their words and example, revolutionary France set about “conquering the whole of Europe for Truth, Moderation and Justice,” as the Comte de Mirabeau exhorted the National Assembly in 1789. The French Revolution aimed to be a European revolution, initiating an imperial universalism and advancing the notion that “society as a whole” may have rights and interests as a collective body. When Thomas Jefferson heralded an “empire of liberty,” he envisioned a space where individual rights and political freedoms could flourish, but the Napoleonic wars applied the concept in a more literal way. Ostensibly wars for liberation, they were actually wars against national sovereignty and identity.
• The revolutionaries in France were greatly influenced by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778), and particularly by The Social Co tract, a book that does not generally appear on the American Founders’ reading lists. In Rousseau’s ideal of civil society, if people did not voluntarily submit to the “general will,” they would be “forced to be free.” Civil liberty was a “positive freedom” established by the state and its laws through a social contract. Independence was to be exchanged for republican liberty in service to the “common good.” Rousseau saw “the individual’s turn away from the state of natural independence and toward participation in civil society as the necessary condition of his or her attainment of full humanity and moral freedom,” as Professor Steven G. Affeldt explained. Only in a society of laws enacted and enforced by citizens could man fulfil his potential and truly emerge as himself. Human rights are thus not inherent; they are the product of positive law. Universality was to be achieved by political unity, and by Napoleonic imperial conquest.
• The distinction between American and French concepts of human rights was often overlooked by American republicans who were proud of their contribution to liberty in France and who promoted brotherhood between the two countries, but the difference is reflected in their foundational documents. The Americans declared their independence on the basis of unalienable, inherent rights, and the Bill of Rights in the United States Constitution restricts legislation in deference to natural, prepolitical rights. The Preamble to the Déclaration des droits de l’Homme et du citoyen (1789) states that the National Assembly set forth therein “the natural, unalienable and sacred rights of man.” Human rights were thus not natural, or inherent, but established by the laws. Article 4 says that the “bounds of liberty … may be determined only by law.” Similar language can be found in the constitutions of most totalitarian governments that condition freedom on state interests, thus implying that if human rights are established by the state and its laws, they can also be taken away by the state.
• In Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), Edmund Burke commented that human rights as proclaimed in the French document were an “abstraction,” inferior to “inherited rights.” The source of law is “within the nation,” he wrote. Natural rights have moral force only when understood as being rooted in a national tradition and lose it when understood as being established by the state. Burke found it “conceited to attempt defining in statutory enactment the whole of natural law.” In an article published in 1951, at the dawn of the global, legalized human rights era, Russel Kirk noted how Burke had disparaged metaphysical equalitarian rights theorists and quoted Burke’s observation that “the rights of man are incapable of definition, but not impossible to be discerned.” They are parts of the natural law that we know in our souls, by our innate moral sense, which finds its con ours in cultural and religious traditions.
• Burke’s “most important contribution to political thought,” according to Kirk, was the passage in Reflections on the Revolutio in France saying that in the partnership of civil society, “all men have equal rights; but not to equal things.” Burke could see where universal human rights were going. Today, top UN officials insist that “economic and social rights” entitle all people to “substantive equality.” Other key ideas that animate the contemporary international human rights system flowed from Rousseau’s utopian and seductive concept of emergent human goodness, a secularization of the Christian doctrine of a reformable human nature. The rights defined and enforced by the state would shape individual character, which could be improved through integration into a holistic and sustaining legal rights framework. In the thought of Rousseau, that legal framework would rest on the “ge eral will.” This concept may be inchoate, but it implies something universal, thus leading to the logic of global governance. While “abstract” and “underdeveloped,” Rousseau’s democratic political theory points toward “a normative framework with potentially global applicability,” writes William Gay; the ideal of a general will in a society easily translates into a notion concerning the common interests of all humanity. After all, something that is “general” may be regarded as universal, and thus “general rights” are universal rights.
• Rousseau’s ideas about the “general will” and the “social contract” directly influenced the foundations of the international human rights system. The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights was conceived as a contract embraced by all people, forming a universal civil society with universal laws. This contract would protect general, universal rights and enable the full development of mankind. In 2020, the secretary-general of the United Nations stated that the UDHR and the human rights instruments that codify its principles represent a “social contract between all human beings by which everyone can live to their fullest potential.”
• Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) also regarded human rights as essential to the realization of human potential, but he held that the only truly inherent right is the freedom to exercise moral agency. This excludes what have come to be called “economic and social rights,” or any positive statutory rights that cannot stand the test of universalizability, since the means to realize it everywhere do not exist. The proliferation of global treaties, regulations and international institutions addressing social and economic issues are inconsistent with Kant’s understanding of human rights.
• Nevertheless, Kant’s reputation increasingly hangs on his putative responsibility for the institutional corruption of human rights. Kant is often named as the inspiration for the “globalist” ideal of a universal juridical order that leads to the imposition of arbitrary norms on sovereign states, undermining traditional values, democracy, borders, and national identities. In a 207 essay, for example, Roger Kimball wrote that Kant’s Perpetual Peace “inspired the architects of the United Nations and, in our own day, the architects of the European Union and the battalions of transnational progressives who jettison democracy for the sake of a more-or-less nebulous (but not therefore un-coercive) ideal of world citizenship.” In 2022, Giorgia Meloni, the prime minister of Italy, attacked what she called the “Kantian universalism of the EU” as a threat to national, religious and family identity. Kant has also been held responsible for the inequities of neoliberalism, or what the leftist French social theorist Pierre Bourdieu called the “utopia of exploitation.”
• Kant’s venture into a theory of international political affairs is actually the weakest part of his legacy. Perpetual Peace (1795) conveys the same intellectual mood as some works of natural and physical scientists who propose clean, rational solutions to world problems. Amidst a general disenchantment with reason, Kant has often been placed among those who constructed a “heave ly city” of Enlightenment philosophy that is irrelevant to the irrational forces shaping history. Kant envisioned the possibility of reason geometrically advancing toward a utopia of moral perfection—a vision that is mocked by obdurate barbarism around the world and by the impotence of international institutions in the face of conflict.
• Regarding international relations, Kant, like Hobbes and Locke, saw no global authority civilizing the state of nature; in Perpetual Peace he wrote that the “perverseness of human nature … shews itself unveiled and unrestrained in the relations of nations with each other, where it is not checked, as in a state of civilization, by the coercive power of the law.” Kant did not over ly promote global governance or even the idea of international human rights law in that work, or in his earlier treatise on international politics, The Idea of History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View (1784). In fact, by showing that global law and governance require coercive enforcement, he suggested that they are impossible.
• Kant also defended the nation-state. Juliana Pilon noted that he sought “to refute the claim that the development of the domes ic state constituted a moral step backwards for humankind.” Principle II of Perpetual Peace affirms that a state is an independent, natural society, a “trunk with its own roots,” drawing moral values from its own tradition. Kant argued forcefully for a republican form of government that protects minority viewpoints, and as a thought experiment he proposed a pacific alliance (foedus pacificum) among states that share republican principles, which themselves disincline nations to war.
• The passage from Perpetual Peace that has perhaps most inspired proponents of an “international community” is where Kant speculated that if all governments are harmonized on republican principles, any “violation of rights, committed in one place, is felt throughout the whole.” In this scenario, “the idea of a cosmopolitan right can no longer pass for a fantastic exaggeration … but is the last step of perfection necessary to the tacit code of civil and public right … conducting towards a perpetual peace….” Kant thus imagined a type of institutionalized universal human rights, but it was a qualified form of universalism. His concept of a peaceful federation was limited to republican states that honored the inherent human right to freedom. Not all societies have the cultural capacity to be rational republics, enter into alliances, and harmonize the protection of their citizens in such a way that human rights violations in cooperating states would be seen as threats to international security—a core principle of the 1975 Helsinki Accords. In fact, it appears that very few do.
• Those who associate projects like the European Union with Kant’s teachings neglect his variation on a Tower of Babel jeremiad, in which he wrote that a federation of states is preferable to a union and his observation that laws always “lose moral energy when the government gains in extent” Kant feared that a “uniform cosmopolitan constitution” would be “even more dangerous to freedom than war.” Unity can be achieved at the national level, where basic political criteria can be applied. For example, Article IV of the United States Constitution mandates that states must be republics in order to be included in the federal union. But even at the national level, unity in democratic states is fragile; nation-states are quite varied in size, and most include subcultures, some of which were forcefully incorporated, and some exhibiting separatist tendencies even after centuries. The political diversity of mankind militates against unification on an international scale. Kant saw that a global political union would result in a “universal monarchy,” a despotism that “destroys minds, and stifles the germs of every good.” World citizenship would contradict national citizenship. Universality exists in the potential for the exercise of reason and for moral connectedness among nations as a consequence, but universal application of reason, and universality itself, remain no more than hypothetical.
• In Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, Kant wrote that our failure to observe the moral law results from our propensity for evil—an echo of Augustinian theology. This disposition can be transformed only by a revolution in one’s personal morality. We could extend this principle to a regime that fails to observe moral law as understood by its citizens and imposes laws that are contrary to their principles: it needs a revolutionary transformation, and that is a task for citizens to accomplish. Kant wrote that “a foreign power’s interference would violate the rights of an independent people struggling with [their state’s] internal ills.” Regime morality and respect for natural rights cannot be imposed from the outside.
• The middle and late 1990s will likely be recalled as the high point of intergovernmental Kantianism and the growth of international civil society. Newly democratic states seemed to indicate the emergence of a universal moral order founded on liberal democracy, which could lead to a perpetual peace or the “end of history.” As human rights standards and law proliferated, human rights universality appeared to be at hand, and in concrete terms, not just as an abstract principle. But the post-Soviet era also ushered in violent ethnic and territorial conflicts. Tyrannies learned to legitimate themselves by sidestepping international legislation while cooperating with UN human rights bureaucracies, and a totalitarian giant, the People’s Republic of China, gained strength.
• In an effort to expand engagement and demonstrate the universality of human rights, the United Nations and other international institutions stressed the economic and social rights favored by oppressive regimes. Human rights then drifted further into the sphere of legal positivism. The idea of human rights as moral rights with associated unconditional moral obligations lost curre cy as the institutional and legalistic human rights project superseded any sense of urgency to defend individual liberty. In an essay titled “Is Universalism a Moral Trap?” the German philosopher Axel Honneth noted that “[r]eferences to the legitimating authority of God, nature, or reason is no longer required; instead it is assumed that human beings themselves are capable of granting the universal rights that guarantee each other a human life with dignity.” With human rights pushed into the legal sphere, unified humanity would set, and violate, its own rules.
• Kant’s theoretical construction of a perpetual peace will never materialize, but it cannot be denied that alliances of republican governments, like the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), discourage aggression and can promote freedom and stability. Kant’s association of republics was to be built from the ground up, expressing choices of citizens and a common embrace of u iversals. The modern tradition of transnational cooperation, on the other hand, derives primarily from the Congress of Vienna, an intergovernmental process and political settlement imposed from the top down, by monarchies that did not honor natural rights.
• The Napoleonic imperium’s centralized regime brought an end to the Age of Reason. Following Napoleon’s defeat, monarchical powers sought their own “perpetual peace,” a slogan embraced by the Holy Alliance of Austria, Prussia and Russia. It would be an external peace, an absence of war between states, but a peace achieved by stifling demands for liberal reforms and democracy. Having absorbed ideas about human rights from America, the French Revolution, and Napoleonic social reforms, European societies under restored monarchies were in constant turmoil, culminating in the massive uprisings of 1848.
• The Congress of Vienna was a series of broad-based international conferences held in 1814–15, after the collapse of the Napoleonic system. Mainly the brainchild of Klemens von Metternich, an archconservative Austrian diplomat, the conferences aimed to clarify borders and also to repress liberalism and nationalism, both of which threatened the Austrian Empire. Henry Kissinger would praise Metternich for achieving fifty years of “relative peace” in Europe, but did not condone his “brutal repression of liberal and radical movements for democracy and national self-determination.” After World War I, the Congress of Vienna came to be seen as the beginning an “age of disillusionment.” While known for reinforcing autocracies, it produced a constitution for the German Federation that provided for civil rights of Jews and freedom of the press, consistent with Napoleonic laws. The Treaty o Berlin, a result of processes begun in the framework of the Congress of Vienna, accorded special legal status to some religious minorities.
• Metternich’s own conservatism was deeply inconsistent with the outlook of transnational progressivism, which now seeks to implant an expansive list of rights into national legal codes through global mandates and self-executing treaties, yet transnational progressivism relies on institutional mechanisms that originated with Metternich. The Congress of Vienna created a template fo international organizations whose outlines remain visible and a “paradigm for international peace” that still informs intergovernmental institutions.
• The Congress of Vienna marked the beginning of the modern notion of a “rules-based international order,” with multilateralism as a principle guiding any nation’s foreign policy. The Europe-centered world system was to be administered by a conference of great powers through “collective management.” Bringing together national representatives from a huge swath of the civilized world to debate and seek accord on general problems, the Congress of Vienna was a forerunner of the League of Nations and the UN General Assembly. It set the precedent of an international and ostensibly neutral secretariat, which became a power capable of ini iating actions on behalf of the institution itself, characterized as actions on behalf of universal humanity, with the moral authority imputed to its embodiment of unity.
• Henry Kissinger built his intellectual reputation on works that analyzed the Congress of Vienna and lauded it for achieving a “balance of powers” that resulted in a “century without a major war.” In reality, the peace lasted only until the Crimean War of 1857, which claimed a half million casualties. Kissinger described the congress as an attempt at “constructing an international order.” This planned and engineered order was envisioned as a framework encompassing the governments of nation-states, with the will of citizens a nonfactor.
• The Congress of Vienna endowed the tradition of international organizations with the prestige of overarching authority and the trappings of pageantry. Aristocrats gathered for meetings in a transcendent realm of influence and intrigue. They attended extravagant receptions, banquets, and balls, in displays of elevated social status and moral virtue. International organizations still exhibit the same aura of grandiosity combined with a posture of moral superiority.
• Over the course of the nineteenth century, the natural rights universalism and the skepticism of intergovernmental treaties and organizations that characterized old liberalism incrementally diminished. Then the horrors of the Great War provoked a new call for transnational institutions to keep peace and uphold universal values.
• While a devastating war raged in Europe, President Woodrow Wilson delivered his “Fourteen Points” to the United States Congress in January 1918. The Fourteen Points “reconceived the very practice of international politics as an evangelistic enterprise, aiming to elevate the better angels of mankind’s nature,” as Matt Gobush wrote in Providence magazine. Point 14 proposed what came to be the League of Nations: “A general association of nations must be formed under specific covenants for the purpose of affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike.” The Covenant of he League declared that it was intended first of all to “promote international co-operation and to achieve international peace and security.” Its purpose was to unite the world, rather than protect rights, but its symbolic embodiment of universality would serve as a model for the global institutionalization of human rights.
• The founding of the League directed political-philosophical inquiry toward a focus on international institutional law as a mechanism for effecting change in how regimes deal with one another and how they treat their own citizens. The League gave form to the idea of an “international community” as an object of scholarly interest in the new discipline of international relations. I drew attention away from the state and toward highly speculative questions about the legitimacy, goals and structure of global organizations, and it encouraged the assumption that the world was moving in the direction of global governance.
• Yet the League of Nations essentially pointed to a future from the past, as Margaret Thatcher would later observe about the Eu opean Union. It echoed previous efforts to impose a uniform moral or legal order on diverse societies, such as the Roman Empire, where “one law governed the world.” It thus expressed a regressive impulse, one that would gain strength as the “transnational-progressive agenda” in which achieving social-democratic goals in any state depends on the force of international law. Transnational progressivism, aiming for global transformation through centralized legal harmonization, was a new iteration of an ancie t, statist universalism.
• While the League of Nations was a reflection of President Wilson’s moral and intellectual sensibilities, he was also a conduit for a broad stream of thought about how the state can shape society and culture. Like other progressives, Wilson opposed the individualism of the Founding Fathers. “Men as communities are supreme over men as individuals,” he asserted in “Socialism and Democracy,” an essay written in 1887, adding that “no line can be drawn between private and public affairs.” He also viewed constitutional rights as obstacles to progress, asserting that “the omnipotence of legislation is the first postulate of all just political theory.”
• The League of Nations internationalized the progressive confidence in the ability of the state, through politically detached experts, to remedy inequalities, reconcile differences, and achieve harmony and peace. Wilson’s moral certainty and faith in his own will suggest that he was influenced (if indirectly) by the pragmatic philosophy of William James. In his 1897 essay “The Will to Believe,” James argued that it is rational to hold beliefs that our passions convince us are valid, regardless of epistemological norms. Wilson campaigned for the League of Nations as a matter of ethical urgency, evangelizing for faith that global unity, peace, and fairness could be achieved.
• Wilson believed that the Covenant of the League, which he drafted, was a pragmatic design for world peace and security, but also suffused with sacral qualities. “There is a pulse of sympathy in it … a compulsion of conscience throughout it,” he said upon completing the document. “It is intended to purify, to elevate.” It was a covenant to “redeem the world,” expressing a social gospel form of Calvinism. Thus it was natural for the League to have its headquarters in Geneva.
• Wilson saw national sovereignty as a roadblock to global unity and international cooperation. In his famous speech to newly na uralized American citizens in 1915, he said:
• My urgent advice to you would be, not only always to think first of America, but always, also, to think first of humanity. You do not love humanity if you seek to divide humanity into jealous camps. Humanity can be welded together only by love, by sympathy, by justice, not by jealousy and hatred.
• Wilson sought to imbue Americans and people around the world with faith in a transnational-collectivist form of universalism.
• When he addressed Congress on April 2, 1917, calling for a declaration of war against Germany, Wilson said that America would e entering the war not to protect national interests, but to “vindicate the principle of peace and justice.” It was, indeed, a fight for an abstraction, “a universal dominion of right.” The United States would act as a “messianic nation,” fighting a “war for righteousness” and seeking to fulfill the kingdom of God on earth, in the spirit of progressive Christianity.
• In 2023, Henry Kissinger remarked that “idealistic” sentiments like those expressed by Wilson still pervaded American views about international obligations:
• We believe we are unselfish, that we have no purely national objectives, and also that our national objectives are achieved in foreign policy with such difficulty that when we expose them to modification through discussion, we get resentful of opponents. And so we expect that our views will carry the day, not because we think we are intellectually superior, but because we think he views in themselves should be dominant.
• Wilson’s idealistic missionary crusade for unity and peace was fortified by faith in rational administration and a confidence hat global problems, like local and national ones, could be solved by a “universal class” of bureaucratic managers. Hegel had introduced this concept in his 1821 essay “Natural Law and the Science of the State: Elements of the Philosophy of Right.” He had no interest in transnational projects, however, holding that the state was the ultimate source of political and moral values, where freedom could be realized. Wilson made reference to a universal class of managers in “The Study of Administration,” published in 1887. This class consisted of people whose self-interest coincided with the interests of humanity as a whole, and who would be civil servants devoted to the general good in the administration of law. Wilson’s domestic initiatives, influenced by the works of John Dewey, represented an effort to democratize Hegel’s ideal. With his plan for the League of Nations, he internationalized the universal class.
• The League spawned a cadre of international civil servants, ideally detached from national interests and dedicated instead to ranscultural norms. The head of the League secretariat sought “League-minded” staff, committed to international priorities, to form an independent, nonpolitical, international civil service. Today, the proliferation of international organizations, courts, treaties and processes is largely driven by the international civil service as a means of self-aggrandizement and self-perpetuation.
• Some opponents predicted the failure of the League of Nations’ engineered international order, arguing that “only an organic g owth could succeed, that any attempt to force growth by coercive or gimmicky schemes must fail disastrously.” In fact, the League was intended to usher in a system of global governance. Like the disintegration of Christendom in the Thirty Years’ War and Napoleon’s destruction of monarchies, the Great War had created an opening for new rules in a consolidated world order. Writing in 1918, E. D. Dickenson asserted that while a “common bond of moral ideals and material interests … [had] long existed in fact between the civilized peoples of the world,” the war “sharpened the sense of international unity” and aroused interest in addressing the “underlying causes of international disorder.”
• Wilson saw the League of Nations as the beginning of “a grand international project,” setting in motion “the gradual developme t of a genuinely global system of governance to maintain justice and facilitate peaceful change.” The concept of the League embodied the idea that nations could be morally transformed in the way that errant individuals could be redeemed; the League offered nations a path toward salvation. Whereas the Congress of Vienna had devised a balance of power, the League would instead build a global structure to oversee a legal community. “There must be not a balance of power, but a community of power … an organized common peace,” said Wilson in his “Peace Without Victory” speech on January 22, 1917. All must “act to unite.”
• The League inaugurated the idea that the legitimacy of international law rests on “the principle of open and comprehensive memership of international organizations.” Exclusion of regimes judged incompatible with the project’s ideals would be antithetical to its messianic aims and the overriding ideal of unity. The inclusiveness of the League reflected what Wilson called his “ca holic sympathy,” which he saw as defining his own humanity. A closed organization, upholding standards that only some nations met, could not claim the mantle of universality. Its standards would be understood as “political” and its initiatives would be tainted with particularism. In debates about membership, references to respecting democratic and republican political rights and freedoms had been dismissed.
• The League of Nations bore little resemblance to Kant’s proposed alliance of republics. Universal participation rather than democracy would be the path to peace. The principle of universality would be “only restricted by moderate qualifications of constitutional homogeneity.” The League thus adopted a strategy of “heterogeneous universality,” tolerating diverse human rights standards and forms of governance among its members. The Covenant stated:
• Any fully self-governing State, Dominion or Colony not named in the Annex may become a Member of the League if its admission is agreed to by two-thirds of the Assembly, provided that it shall give effective guarantees of its sincere intention to observe its international obligations, and shall accept such regulations as may be prescribed by the League in regard to its military, aval and air forces and armaments.
• But there was no means of enforcing these obligations other than the good faith of member states, and autocratic governments were unlikely to honor the covenant. Nevertheless, the League essentially opened its doors to all. Its approach to membership criteria illustrates a “functionalist” strategy for integrating societies with diverse political principles. In The Progress of In ernational Government (1933), for example, David Mitrany, a proponent of “internationalism,” wrote that uniformity is not necessary for international cooperation.
• It can be argued that excluding states from an international organization because they don’t meet humane political standards is contrary to the goal of integrating and reforming such states. Ideally, universal cooperation would yield respect for universal standards. The League of Nations brought into modern times the ancient and medieval aspiration to create a morally homogeneous international body, where errant members would be reformed within an institutional superstructure. In a short and largely forgotten book published in 1931, Medieval Internationalism, the British clergyman R. F. Wright drew parallels between the medieval papacy and the League of Nations, concluding that the Church had contributed to peace because “reasonable and lasting peace is based on moral or spiritual grounds rather than on martial force.” The book presented pre-Reformation Europe as a model of unity, which could be replicated by an organization like the League, based not on a balance of power but on the “power of good will and unselfishness.”
• Supporters of the League held that moral universality would be achieved by universal inclusion; organized cooperation among diverse nations would promote fraternity among them. The German delegation to the League stated, “Only when universality has been established will the true spirit of democracy, the spirit of reconciliation and goodwill … preside of the solution of all those problems which still divide the peoples.” Democracy and peace would emerge from universal cooperation based on an a priori model of regime transformation—a reversal of Thomas Jefferson’s vision of a world made more peaceful by democratic revolutions. It was assumed then, as now, that group dynamics in an international organization would draw nations toward conformity. Appeals to conscience and appearances would lead to good behavior, as in social processes whereby deviant behavior is brought into harmony with group norms in a civil society.
• The League of Nations set a precedent for international organizations to be progressive social engineering projects designed to pull the governments of member states into compliance with centrally defined principles and goals. Over time, cooperation itself would iron out policy differences, even those reflecting deep disparities in political culture. A homogeneous global political culture would thus emerge. It was believed that member states would align with central values and standards. Apparently, it was not foreseen that those standards, and respect for international law itself, might be corroded by persistent noncompliance a d mutual adjustment.
• The Czechoslovak politician Eduard Beneš, in 1933, described the League of Nations as a “social contract” designed to infuse democratic principles into international relations. “By means of a sort of voluntary social contract between civilized nations [the League] attempted to transplant into the sphere of international relations those principles of a democratic legal system known in the sphere of internal national order.” What was needed to ensure the process of integration into this legal order was more “international education.” (Beneš was subsequently associated with decrees under which citizens of German and Hungarian descent were expelled from Czechoslovakia following World War II.)
• International education would be accomplished in part by law. Wilson and other proponents of the League saw international law as promulgated law above states, rather than a law of nations understood by sovereign states as natural law. It would be positive law whose legitimacy rested on the authority of global institutions; a law assuming a community of states acting like a natio al community of individuals, where behavior is constrained by the consensual moral bonds of civil society. International law would unite the world. It would be a teacher of nations, as per the Christian doctrine that had given moral confidence to propone ts of expansive domestic and international legislation.
• In a 1927 pamphlet titled “Liberalismus,” Ludwig von Mises wrote that the challenge facing the League was not simply “a matter of organization or of the technique of international government, but the greatest ideological question that mankind has ever faced.” Mises argued that global peace depended on a particular “frame of mind” becoming pervasive throughout the world.
• It is a question of whether we shall succeed in creating throughout the world a frame of mind without which all agreements for the preservation of peace and all the proceedings of courts of arbitration will remain, at the crucial moment, only worthless scraps of paper. This frame of mind can be nothing less than the unqualified, unconditional acceptance of liberalism. Liberal thinking must permeate all nations, liberal principles must pervade all political institutions, if the prerequisites of peace are to be created and the causes of war eliminated.
• Mises was thus raising the problem of political culture, the role of customs in political transformation that Montesquieu had identified. Without moral consensus, international law was a fantasy.
• The League of Nations is now known mostly for failing to prevent another world war, but that failure did not dampen hopes that a new global organization could be more successful. The United Nations was largely a “revised League of Nations,” with a more elaborate secretariat but essentially no more coercive power. Like the League, the UN had a “mission of universality.”
• The formation of the UN and its human rights system expressed a renewed attention to the ideas of Hugo Grotius. Indeed, the “G otian tradition” was invoked to “provide a historically-situated theoretical foundation for the post-War order.” Hersch Lauterpacht, the British jurist who was a founder of international human rights law, published an influential essay on the Grotian tradition in 1946. Just as the Thirty Years’ War had given impetus to the birth of international law, Lauterpacht suggested that World War II should lead to a global system of human rights law. He revived Grotius’s view that a wise ruler will “take account not only of the good of the nation committed to his care, but of the whole human race.” Lauterpacht maintained that the “Grotian tradition” lay at the heart of international law, which was thus a fundamentally moral project.
• World War II spurred world leaders to seek “comprehensive” solutions to global problems, just as the First World War had done. Preventing a repetition of its horrors, especially genocide and other mass crimes against humanity, was widely seen as hinging on the formation of stronger international institutions and laws. The principle of “world federalism” was supported by a wide range of dignitaries including Albert Einstein, Mahatma Gandhi, Wendell Wilkie, and Winston Churchill, who had outlined his plan for “a World Council” on a BBC broadcast in 1943.
• Like the League of Nations, the United Nations was not specifically intended to protect human rights, but to foster peace, ultimately by affecting the moral outlook of leaders and citizens. The founding of the UN occurred at a time when progressive movements of left-wing political parties, trade unions, and social Catholics were promoting transformative social reform in France, Britain and the United States. The UN represented an extension of ambitions for social solidarity to a global scale.
• On the principle that an international structure for promoting peace through law must be inclusive, the UN adhered to the same inclusive principle of “heterogeneous universality” that had characterized the League of Nations. In discussions about establishing a “general international organization” at the Dumbarton Oaks Conference in 1944, it was resolved to open the institution to all “peace loving states.” Totalitarian states claimed to love peace and therefore could not logically be excluded. Indeed, the very purpose of the organization was to bind them into a peacekeeping structure. Such an organization would be unneeded in a world without aggressive regimes, and thus the legitimacy of the UN depended on the existence of member states that threatened its principles. The UN has never expelled or suspended a member.
• Universal membership in the UN has not resulted in peace, nor have the nearly three hundred armed conflicts since 1946 seriously eroded commitment to the institution. No one should deny that the UN, by providing a global forum for diplomacy and the exchange of information, has contributed to reducing armed conflict. Where the UN expanded the League of Nations mandate was in its aim to monitor and promote respect for human rights. But keeping peace and supporting human rights are distinct and often conflicting activities. While respect for human rights contributes to social and international peace, prioritizing peace and stability often results in suppressing the exercise of human rights. Conflict resolution requires inclusion and neutrality, but protecting human rights demands the upholding of principles, standards and distinctions, essentially inviting political conflict that could turn violent.
• The struggle for liberty will always result in conflict within nations and sometimes between nations.
• Chapter 5 The Universal Declaration of Human Rights as Incarnation of Natural Law
• The devastation of two world wars and the influence of progressive ideology boosted and broadened the appeal of institutional universalism. Seeking global solutions to common problems, world leaders embarked on an ambitious project of building holistic intergovernmental bodies with their own authority and dynamics. The aim was to create a global civil society, something formerly seen as a contradiction in terms and incompatible with the natural rights philosophy that characterized the liberalism of John Locke and America’s Founders.
• The Founders firmly believed in a universal natural law that is discernable by reason, which guided the formation of governmen s honoring basic liberties. Being grounded in classical philosophy, they appreciated Aquinas’s distinction between natural (mo al) law and positive law, and they understood that no unifying authority with meaningful legal power existed above sovereign nations. They did not waver in defending the principle of individual rights or doubt that it was universally valid, but they steered clear of imperial pretentions. Nor was their message of universal human rights apparently ever viewed as a form of cultural imperialism. America’s founding generation saw human rights as universal but not international, being based on what individuals everywhere have in common, rather than on intergovernmental consensus. The leading proponents of political freedom spread thei message as one from the people of a free society to those in unfree societies, with reference to universal moral laws but not to anything like international law. Universality resided in the need for individuals everywhere to be free from coercion, a message that overtly challenged the oppressive monarchies of the Old World.
• By contrast, the establishment of the United Nations with an emphasis on human rights embodied the idea that all sovereign regimes are legitimate, and the expectation that all could evolve toward respect for freedom and dignity within the framework of a stable international order. Human rights, as an ideal and in practice, would be approached collectively. The United Nations Cha ter can be seen as an attempt to unify nations, and also to reconcile two distinct traditions of human rights: the political tradition of international harmony based on natural law that originated in Hellenism and emphasized peace, and the Enlightenment radition of natural rights rationalism, which affirmed the sovereign independence of nation-states. The UN Charter bridges these traditions by affirming national sovereignty and tempering the revolutionary spirit of the natural rights campaign, subjecting it to rules that prioritize unity and stability over individual liberty.
• The United Nations, eventually modeled on the League of Nations, originated in an agreement made among the Allied forces during World War II. On January 1, 1942, the four major allied powers, along with twenty-two other states, signed the United Nations Declaration. The term “United Nations” referred to the anti-Axis alliance. The signatories proclaimed that they were fighting to defend human rights, being “convinced that complete victory over their enemies is essential to defend life, liberty, independence and religious freedom, and to preserve human rights and justice in their own lands as well as in other lands, and that they are now engaged in a common struggle against savage and brutal forces seeking to subjugate the world.”
• Among the “big four” signatories endorsing these words was the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, a totalitarian imperial state that had committed massive crimes against humanity and that denied virtually all civil and political rights. While the leaders of the liberal democratic allies unquestionably had respect for human rights, this inclusion set a precedent of accommodating equivocations on human rights in the service of political goals, in this case victory over “Hitlerism.”
• The Preamble to the UN Charter begins by strongly affirming the centrality of human rights to the project of forging peace and international unity:
• We the peoples of the United Nations determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind, and to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small, and to establish conditions under which justice and respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law can be maintained, and to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom …
• Points 3 and 4 of Article 1 say that the purposes of the United Nations include:
• 3. To achieve international co-operation in solving international problems of an economic, social, cultural, or humanitarian character, and in promoting and encouraging respect for human rights and for fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language, or religion; and
• 4. To be a centre for harmonizing the actions of nations in the attainment of these common ends.
• The Charter presents human rights as deriving from “treaties and other sources of international law,” agreements entered into voluntarily and mandating that governments “establish conditions” for compliance. It expresses a commitment to human rights without defining them or endorsing the principle of universal, inherent rights. The global process of complying with obligations would be guided from an administrative center to ‘harmonize” the world’s diverse approaches, and the ideal of human rights would be subject to the necessities of unity.
• Article 4 shows the same principle of heterogeneous universality that characterized the League of Nations: “Membership in the United Nations is open to all other peace-loving states which accept the obligations contained in the present Charter and, in the judgment of the Organization, are able and willing to carry out these obligations.” The UN General Assembly has never had memership criteria, and as a security institution it should not. The Charter allows the Security Council—on which Russia and China sit as permanent members—to expel or suspend a UN member, but it has never done so. Indeed, none of the many unfree states in he UN would ever support an ejection of a member on grounds of human rights violations, as that precedent would threaten their own standing. Thus the UN’s inclusive universalism created a broad conspiracy of hypocrisy.
• The Charter affirmed the sovereign nation-state as the basis for building a stable and peaceful world order, a principle without which few if any governments would have agreed to join the organization. It declared institutional neutrality, recognizing every government as legitimate regardless of its origins, form of governance, human rights record, or any other external norm. The United Nations would honor the “sovereign equality” of all states (Chapter I, Article 2), holding the small and weak to be morally equal to the large and powerful. The Charter sought to establish the right of all states to freedom from aggression and subjugation by others, just as all individuals in a civil society enjoy the same right not to have their liberty imposed upon.
• The architects of the UN adopted an activist universalism, reaching beyond the goal of peacekeeping to pull in the principle o human rights as one that could moralize its heterogeneous universality. The institution was to be the world’s custodian of universal human rights as a matter of international law. It would define global moral law by drawing from all of the world’s socie ies and project it downward in its harmonizing mandate. The UN Charter collectivized and universalized the question of human rights while affirming sovereignty and particularism, with the aim of launching a progressive, forward-looking process of reform.
• The UN’s human rights system, promoting a liberal ideal, was fused onto the heterogeneous universality of the General Assembly, putting the principle of human rights in the service of inclusivity. Protean language in the UN Charter foretold a program of human rights transformation, which created an illusion of unity that suppresses political liberalization. The institutional demand for consensus and the processes of intergovernmental legal politics have desiccated the very concept of liberty.
• At its origins, the UN institutionalized a contradiction between fostering peace and advancing freedom. The organization’s hard rules were limited to those concerning peace, which intrinsically supported the status quo by conferring legitimacy upon all regimes whether or not they recognized individual rights. While proclaiming human rights as central to the UN’s purposes, the Charter, in Article 2, established a policy of noninterference in the internal affairs of member states. The UN would regulate relations between states but not attempt to control policies within them. In practice, it would be a neutral forum where diverse nations and power blocks could interact. Its concrete program was to organize debate focused on conflict prevention and resolution, and to take collective action against aggressors. The UN has little or no authority of its own to represent or carry out actions outside of authorized peacekeeping in accordance with what members signed on for in the Charter. The Security Council, following a pattern set by the Congress of Vienna, allowed any one of the world’s fifteen most influential states to veto any actio .
• Implementation of the broad and vague human rights principles agreed to in the Charter would be guided by the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), an elected body consisting of fifty-four members of the General Assembly, ensuring that no regional approach or any particular vision of freedom and justice could dominate. The UN’s human rights program was thus placed firmly under he control of what was essentially a committee of the whole. The Charter (Article 62, para 2) says that ECOSOC “may make recommendations for the purpose of promoting respect for, and observance of, human rights and fundamental freedoms for all.” Nothing in the Charter appears to have given any regime serious anxiety about potential pressure to import and abide by liberal political principles.
• In itself, a standing conference of governments is not utopian, since it does not pose as a civil society. But the UN Charter did not satisfy the ambitious institutional universalism of postwar Western democracies. For some, the importance of the UN has always been global government in the making. Reflecting on fifty years of UN membership in 2023, Henning Hoff, a member of the German Council on Foreign Relations, remarked, “The most important instrument that German foreign policy has is to rely strongly on the UN to establish something like world governance.”
• In the wake of World War II, many leaders believed that true peace in the world depended on the harmonization of political sys ems so as to eradicate the domestic sources of international conflict. To prevent further genocide and mass atrocities, the nations of the world needed to act as a community in protecting human rights, which meant subjecting their own laws to common principles. They needed to rise above the “state of nature” and establish a civil society among themselves, guided and disciplined by a central power that could act with the authority they granted it collectively. They must transform the moral principles of human rights into a legal program with concrete social objectives.
• The project of promoting universal human rights would need worldwide consensus in order to be accepted as more than a culturally bound agenda of some societies in the West. A powerful current of thought fed into a belief that the way to move states toward respect for universal human rights was through multicultural committees in global institutions, issuing declarations endorsed by pluralities and, eventually, binding international law. This assumption went largely unquestioned in the postwar years. Amidst the enthusiasm for global institutionalization, little notice was given to its incompatibility with fundamental liberal principles.
• The United Nations Charter paved the way for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Issued in 1948, the UDHR became the mo al foundation of the UN and the vehicle for world harmony. While the institutional structure of the UN drew on the model of intergovernmental relations associated with the Treaty of Westphalia (1648), the Universal Declaration was anchored in Hellenistic and Roman-Christian traditions of universalism, as well as the intergovernmental principles and theological natural law of Christendom and the Christian tradition of redemption through transformation.
• The UN Charter reflects the principle of secularized natural law, akin to what Hugo Grotius envisioned in the seventeenth century, along with the accretion of institutional forms that emerged in the Congress of Vienna and the League of Nations. The UDHR extended the moral reach of global institutions, thereby changing their character. It presents human rights as the “culmination of the epoch-making emergence of cosmopolitanism, defined … as the universalistic inclusion of all humanity in the set of morally relevant subjects of political concern and action,” according to the historian Samuel Moyn. Representing a “politico-theological approach” to human rights, the UDHR ushered in a modernized form of cosmopolitanism, with a legitimating discourse of “the emergent institutionality of universal human rights,” and became the de facto “basic law” of a worldwide civil society. Universal human rights, thus conceived, were intrinsically bound to be institutionalized.
• Christianized natural law, an orphan in the modern world of independent, secular nation-states and legal positivism, was adopted by the international community to be raised in the absence of its father and rebranded as human rights. The Universal Declaration’s main influencers conceived it as a moral constitution for the world, meant to integrate separate cultures and polities within a consensus about ethical standards for the treatment of citizens and other people, in accordance with the principle of “equal concern and respect” for all. This integration was to be accomplished by reviving structural principles from Christendom whereby the Church regulated the behavior of rulers through its hierocratic power, which Max Weber called “the most ancient check on all political power.” In the new universal institution, a secularized hierocracy could forge compromise between transcenden human rights standards and the diverse worldly laws and practices of the sovereign members of the United Nations. As in Christendom, the threat to the integrity of the UN’s moral order has come from elements within it that do not respect or feel constrained by its principles, but follow a “different universalism.”
• The Universal Declaration embodies the “internationalization of human rights.” Today it is difficult to imagine the defense of human rights apart from the international “human rights system,” applicable to all nations and binding them together under common standards. The promotion of human rights is generally understood to be mainly the responsibility of international institutio s that have authority over the substance and methods of the human rights campaign. These institutions are accorded more legitimacy in defending human rights than any sovereign state.
• The framers of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights believed that human rights must be seen as arising from all the world’s traditions if they were to be accepted as a legitimate expression of a moral consensus. The well-documented drafting process scrupulously followed a principle of diversity, equality and inclusion. At the same time, the UDHR clearly reflects the influence of Catholic social teachings, which served as “common ground for cultures and ideologies that were vehemently opposed to one another,” according to Paul Marshall. The human rights system that developed around the UDHR is a secularized mirror of Christe dom, being flexible enough to incorporate elements that violate natural rights, in the interest of achieving a tenuous moral unity in the world. The system rests on vague language and soft law that is optional, and like Christendom it conflates transcendent natural law with a politically derived law of nations, thus being a form of “immanentization,” a utopian effort to bring heaven to earth.
• The intellectual character of the Universal Declaration tracks closely with the thought of Jacques Maritain, a Catholic theologian who was one of its primacy advocates. Maritain was not a member of any of the international committees that contributed content and drafted the UDHR, but he was a guiding light and a strong public advocate for the project. Maritain “presided over several of the earliest U.N. meetings on human rights,” according to Paul Marshall, and “had a great theoretical influence in the period leading up to” the actual drafting of the document; “He was a godfather to the process.”
• Born in Paris in 1882, Maritain was baptized a Catholic as a young man. Having despaired over what he considered the rationalized sterility of modernity, he found in the Church a “coherent spiritual, social, and cultural ethos that respected the natural order of rights and duties.” Eventually he became a leading authority on Thomas Aquinas and a critic of secular humanism as an “anthropocentric conception of man and culture,” instead advocating an “integral Christian humanism.” His 1936 book, Integral Humanism, outlined both a Catholic anthropology and a political project that encompassed social and economic philosophy, a blueprint for a “temporal regime of modern Christendom.”
• Maritain defended natural law as the foundation of human law, including the law of nations, and the basis for international human rights standards as well. “The Law of Nations, or the common law of civilization, deals, like natural law, with the rights and duties which follow from the first principle in a necessary manner,” he wrote in The Rights of Man and the Natural Law, firs published in French in 1942. Maritain characterized the law of nations as “a prolongation or an extension of natural law.” Like the Romans, he saw the law of nations and natural law as occupying the same moral lane and serving as a foundation for global legal regimes.
• The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, in Maritain’s view, was to be “the preface to a moral Charter of the civilized world.” This reformed world should be responsive to what he saw as a paramount human need for communal solidarity; The Rights of Man and the Natural Law contains affirmations of individual freedom, but tilts markedly toward communitarianism. He repeatedly condemns “anarchic individualism” and criticizes societies formed to protect individual rights as lacking any form of “communion.” When such rights were focused only on the individual good, they “would dissolve society as such for the benefit of its parts” a d would lead to an “anarchy” of “bourgeois materialism … thereby enabling the strong to oppress the weak.” In Maritain’s philosophy, “The aim of society is its own common good, the good of the social body.” This did not mean the good of society as such, ut the good of the “multitude of persons; it is their communion in the good life.” To this end, the “gifts of goodness” need to be shared by all. The common good “implies a redistribution, it must be redistributed among the persons and it must aid their development.”
• Maritain argued for the moral unification of global society not through coercion, but through consensual juridical structures hat would lead humanity to “higher degrees of organization and unification, corresponding to higher degrees of collective conscience.” Here he used a term popularized by the generally collectivist sociology of Emile Durkheim and the writings of Antonio G amsci, a Marxist. The catholic ambition of Maritain was to harmonize differing versions of human rights, and also to resolve antinomies within the Western human rights tradition. He sought to bridge the Enlightenment philosophy of natural rights with the Catholic natural law tradition.
• For Maritain, wrote Mary Ann Glendon, national sovereignty posed a threat of totalitarianism, and thus realizing universal human rights depended on building “a global legal order that is effectively supranational and imposes a neomedieval rule of law without absolute sovereigns.” He attached his human rights philosophy to the UN Charter’s vision of a human rights project embedded in a global assembly—in essence, a secular incarnation of the Church, which he saw as “a supra-national,” universal and inclusive society. It is clear that he expected the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to resacralize international relations as a law of nations.
• In 1947, Maritain led the French delegation to the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), and in that role he convinced national delegations that achieving unity and consensus on human rights was imperative. Michael Ignatieff, among others, has identified the main obstacle to consensus on the rights enumerated in the UDHR as disagreement about the philosophical justification for those rights—whether, for example, rights are inherent and given by God or nature, or rather are bestowed by the state. Generally speaking, this is the issue that most divides liberal societies from those that do not honor individual rights and freedoms. Maritain is widely credited with achieving agreement on the text of the UDHR by persuading delegates to sideline the question of the foundation or source of human rights. In his book recounting the UDHR debates, he recalled that a list of rights had been agreed to “on condition that no one asks us why. That ‘why’ is where the argument begins.”
• C. M. A. McCauliff observes that Maritain “galvanized support” for the UDHR by employing a “consensus approach” without an “accompanying philosophy,” and that this strategy derived from his understanding of natural law. As elements of natural law, the rights in the Universal Declaration were to be grasped by moral intuition and therefore needed no rational explanation or justification. “Maritain was able to focus agreement on essentials of the moral sense without being deflected by philosophical justifications on which people could not agree.”
• Maritain saw the central aim in the drafting of the UDHR as achieving international consensus “on common practical notions … o the affirmation of the same set of convictions governing action,” as opposed to “speculative notions … on the conception of the world, man, and knowledge.” It was a political rather than “metaphysical” approach to human rights. Despite profound theoretical disagreement about the moral and philosophical justifications for human rights and their political implications, practical agreement could be reached around general concepts that can mean different things and be applied in different ways.
• By declaring irrelevant the question of whether or not human rights are inherent, Maritain in effect endorsed denial of the objective universality of human rights and the ideal of unconditional rights. It was a sacrifice of universality for the sake of inclusive universalism, neglecting a lesson from the history of Christendom: that “influence over the secular domain is purchased at the expense of the purity of the influencing doctrine,” in the words of Neil Walker. Maritain’s practical approach to universal rights would eventually lead to a divorce between human rights law and its moral basis. As a consequence, an expansive array of human rights legislation would be used to justify utilitarian public policy.
• An ample space for linguistic consensus on human rights was provided by the “dignitarian rights” tradition, which is associated with constitutions of Latin American and continental European states. Tyrannies and ethnonationalist regimes, as well as liberal democracies, claim to promote human dignity. The preamble to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights opens by affirming that “recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world ….”
• The idea of human dignity has specific roots in the Judeo-Christian doctrine that all human beings are created in the image and likeness of God, and therefore participate, “in a limited way, in transcendent divine freedom, reason, power, creativity, moral concern, and love.” But the idea of dignity imported into the UDHR also portrays humans as “vulnerable” and needing protectio . In the tradition of dignitarian human rights, all people are entitled to “conditions and opportunities that will allow us to freely and fully develop as persons.”
• The concept of dignity underpins the notion that human rights must include positive state obligations to provide the conditions under which freedom can be enjoyed—the principle behind categorizing welfare rights as human rights. The UDHR adopted the Roosevelt administration’s classification of welfare policies as a means of respecting universal human rights, and thus as universal legal obligations demanded by sacrosanct humanity itself. The vulnerable of the world all needed the protection of internationally defined, monitored and regulated economic and social rights. Dignity could be achieved by the provision of material entitlements based on international human rights standards and law, essentially a global social policy.
• The UDHR includes both individual “freedom rights,” such as freedom of religion, expression, and association—negative liberties that need only state restraint to be honored—and a list of “economic, social and cultural rights” that require the promulgation of statutory rights in positive law. It mingles the human rights principles of liberal and collectivist regimes. In an earlie book, I documented how the inclusion of economic and social rights in the UDHR indicates that the goal of achieving political unity determined the form that the declaration took, and I demonstrated how this inclusion has diluted respect for basic freedom rights. In asserting that human rights are not all inherent, individual and inalienable, the UDHR undercut the principle that basic freedoms are inalienable.
• The bridge between individual and social rights in the UDHR, and the basis of its broad political support, came from Catholic social philosophy. The Latin American and continental European constitutions that influenced the UDHR were, in turn, shaped by Christian Democratic and Christian Social parties. Those political parties had drawn upon social encyclicals of the Catholic Chu ch, including Rerum Novarum (1891) and Quadragesimo Anno (1931), in which the Church reflected on “the Enlightenment, the eighteenth-century revolutions, socialism, and the labor question in the light of Scripture, tradition, and her own experience as an ‘expert in humanity.’” Quadragesimo Anno reaffirmed views about civil authority expressed forty years earlier by Leo XIII. “[B]oldly breaking through the confines imposed by Liberalism,” the pope had
• fearlessly taught that government must not be thought a mere guardian of law and of good order, but rather must put forth every effort so that “through the entire scheme of laws and institutions ... both public and individual well-being may develop spontaneously out of the very structure and administration of the State.” Just freedom of action must, of course, be left both to individual citizens and to families, yet only on condition that the common good be preserved and wrong to any individual be abolished. 
• This encyclical was an inspiration for fascist regimes in the 1930s. The corporatist principles of Rerum Novarum and Quadragesimo Anno were also implanted into the international human rights system. With these influences, the UDHR laid the “politico-theological” foundation for international human rights and for its institutional universalism.
• The conception and enumeration of human rights that would inform the UDHR were to be universal in the sense of being an amalgam of what the diverse cultures of the world regarded as human rights. According to Maritain, the different concepts could be synthesized “if we adopt a practical viewpoint and concern ourselves no longer with seeking a basis and philosophical significance of human rights but only in their statement and enumeration.” He also took the “historical view,” seemingly incompatible with belief in an unchanging natural law, “that a bill of rights could not be exhaustive and final because the state of the moral conscience and civilization change from age to age,” according to McCauliff. Natural law, being unwritten, is prone to plasticity and amenable to transformation in the service of progress.
• Admirably, Maritain’s Christian personalism put the individual at the center of his concerns in the imperative of respecting human dignity. But the idea of dignity is open to various interpretations, which is why it can be accepted by diverse regimes as a unifying principle. Today, individual freedom rights are often deemed “divisive” and responsible for conflict, while “dignity” is promoted as an alternative that bridges differing political orientations and opens possibilities for dialogue. An emphasis on common support for dignity has resulted in a corrosive moral relativism that sacrifices individual liberty rights to economic and social rights.
• The emergence of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights has since assumed an almost miraculous aura. Asbjorn Eide, a leading advocate for economic and social rights, wrote that the UDHR “is regarded as history’s proudest example of forging an international, multicultural, politically pluralistic consensus on the need to protect human dignity, and marked the start of a ‘program’ of global transformation to allow people to live in ‘humane’ societies.” The UDHR signified the birth of a moralized international system, a turning point in history. The hollow consensus on principles launched a process of codification and soft law proclamation by international bodies—laws and standards that are widely ignored and abused.
• The moral constitution of a unified world was forged in the interest of unanimity, disregarding the way that nation-states actually behave, and neglecting historical wisdom about the foundations of true liberty. The process resembled how the Roman Empire and Christendom incorporated elements from a variety of cultures and called the result an expression of universal natural law. The UDHR came into existence with the approval of forty-eight states, while eight abstained and the remaining two UN member states at the time did not vote. Some observers question whether this warrants the designation of “universal,” a term intended to strengthen claims about the document. Its use recalls Aristotle’s comment about lawyers invoking natural law as a rhetorical tool.
• From the perspective of macrosociology, every society has a moral center where its core values are “embodied and propounded.” The United Nations and its human rights institutions have aspired to be repositories of the central values and beliefs of an international civil society. Member states are encouraged to form national human rights institutions, which are supervised by a bu eaucracy based in Geneva; they are subsidiary bodies in a tiered, corporatist model. The existence of such institutions, and their conformity with the expectations of central authorities, is one of the main criteria by which the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights evaluates compliance with international standards in the Universal Periodic Review.
• Universal human rights have pulled the world toward global institutionalization. While the trend has largely been driven by progressive politics and by influential elites who staff international institutions and benefit from their expansion, it also flows logically, and indeed morally, from the idea of universal human rights. International human rights practice generally takes place within the UDHR, the nine legally binding global human rights conventions, and the UN Human Rights Council with its subinstitutions and processes. The idea of human rights has thus been externalized and channeled into habituated patterns of thought a d action in the UN system, which is the “house” of human rights just as the Church became the house of Christianity. But institutionalization weakens the principles that animate universal rights and bends them to achieve consensus under an illusory moral unity.
• Consistent with Maritain’s vision, the UDHR was “formulated to comfortably operate across societies, even if they had significantly different value systems,” as Seth Kaplan notes, in order to achieve a synthesis of “sociocentric” and “individualistic” interpretations of human rights. The declaration was made to function for both “thick” and “thin” societies—for those where cultu e, religion and tradition deeply inform social and legal norms, and for more open, modern societies that secure free space for individual choice.
• The legitimacy of the UDHR lies in its flexibility: signatories have wide berth to interpret its language in accordance with their own political cultures and to implement the principles in ways compatible with them. Multiple conceptions of human rights are in play within a single institutional matrix, but not a dogmatic moral matrix. The UDHR’s principles are subjected to “flexile universalism,” by which they are bent in order to be accepted by governments that reject its core elements. This process is lethal to the principle of unconditional, inherent freedom.
• The UN human rights system operates on the premise that the political culture of a state will be progressively transformed not by internal changes in civil society, as Montesquieu taught, but by governmental cooperation with UN institutions and deepening harmonization with international human rights standards and legislation (“implementation”). Inclusivity is a prerequisite for this approach, and tolerance of differences, even human rights abuses, is necessary for the sake of inclusivity. According to Jack Donnelly, a mainline defender of the Universal Declaration system,
• Human rights are at once a utopian ideal and a realistic practice for implementing that ideal…. [They] can thus be a self-fulfilling moral prophecy. If the underlying moral vision of human nature is within the “natural” limits of possibility, then implementing those rights will make “real” that previously “ideal” nature…. Human rights shape political society, so as to shape huma beings.
• The UDHR is the foundation of a system that brings unfree states into political communion with liberal democracies. By classifying state-given rights as morally equivalent to inherent natural rights, this system has blurred the distinction between freedom and tyranny. Economic and social rights brought vulgar positive law into the sanctuary of human rights, leading to a proliferation of rights and the subjection of human rights to bureaucratic and technocratic rationalization. The most influential proponent of UN human rights institutions today is the People’s Republic of China, a totalitarian hegemon. North Korea (the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea), a country that holds about 150,000 innocent people in unimaginably degrading concentration camps and burns political prisoners alive, is praised in UN human rights reviews for signing a treaty on the rights of the disabled.
• The claim that the UDHR system can reconcile the human rights principles of “thick” and “thin” societies might have some validity if human rights were understood to comprise a narrow range of freedoms that can be honored by state restraint. But the freedom rights in the UDHR are balanced against economic and social rights that reinforce state interventions in society and intrusions into the zone of individual autonomy. As a consequence, the UN human rights system thickens thin societies, spawning the collectivist institutions and regulations of universalist, global culture, but has been ineffective in thinning thick ones by crea ing more space for individual freedom.
• “Human rights are literally the cornerstone of the United Nations,” said Volker Türk, the high commissioner for human rights, in a message to the UN Human Rights Council at the opening of the body’s 53rd Session on June 19, 2023. He recalled that a copy of the Universal Declaration had been placed in the cornerstone of the UN headquarters in New York when the structure was being built. “International cooperation is vital, so that we can advance human rights,” he told the council. “This is what the United Nations Charter puts forward as a premise.”
• The high commissioner reviewed a list of urgent human rights situations around that world, which did not include problems in China. But he did report:
• In the past year … China has cooperated with several treaty bodies, leading to important guidance for follow-up. They include concerns in relation to the National Security Law in Hong Kong SAR; discrimination against Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in Xinjiang UAR; assimilation policies that undermine the identity of minorities, including Tibetan people; as well as restrictions on the civic space.
• Apparently, these problems were not considered urgent, while China’s inclusion in the process of setting “guidance” on them was taken as a mark of progress.
• The legitimacy of the United Nations human rights system rests on addressing issues collectively, and the dogma of inclusiveness is almost universally accepted by civil society human rights actors. For example, I asked an influential human rights expert how he viewed developments in the Human Rights Council, given that it is dominated by China and other dictatorial and authorita ian countries. He replied, astonishingly, that the council was performing better than at any other time in its history, and he cited the strong involvement of China as evidence; the corruption of the institution was seen as a mark of success.
• In an article published for Chinese readers, President Xi Jinping acknowledged that he did not believe in “universal values” like human rights, saying they are simply part of the “bourgeoise ideologies” of the West. By accommodating such a viewpoint, the Human Rights Council works smoothly from a bureaucratic and process perspective, but it arguably contributes to a global deterioration of human rights by whitewashing its own members’ abuses. Meanwhile, it focuses excessive and unfair condemnation on the State of Israel. UN Watch, a Geneva-based nongovernmental organization, reported in December 2024 that over a two-year period, which included the Hamas massacre in Israel in October 2023,
• Türk [the High Commissioner] issued 58 statements targeting Israel, 49 of them on or after October 7th. Most of the statements—32—are strong, with 20 moderate, and 6 weak. At the same time that High Commissioner Türk either completely or mostly ignored egregious violations affecting millions of people in China (population 1.4 billion), Yemen (population 34 million), North Korea (population 26 million), Syria (population 23 million), Cuba (population 11 million), Eritrea (population 3.8 million), and many other countries, Türk initiated 58 statements against Israel. These included 49 statements criticizing Israel’s war agai st Hamas and other Palestinian terrorists following Hamas’s October 7 invasion of Israel….
• The work of the high commissioner has responded to political pressure, betraying the principle of detached neutrality.
• The institutionalization of human rights has drawn the governments of liberal societies into multilateral processes that are supposed to encourage repressive regimes to respect basic freedoms. Multilateralism is defined as the “coordination of relations among three or more states on the basis of generalized principles of conduct.” It means governments acting collectively, guided by consensus, common rules and standards, in centralized processes. The conventional approach to multilateral action was summed up by Kamala Harris as the U.S. vice president:
• From the wreckage of two world wars, a consensus emerged in Europe and the United States. A consensus in favor of order, not chaos; security, not conflict. So by forging relationships and bonds, forging organizations and institutions, laws and treaties, we, together, established a set of rules, norms that have governed ever since.
• It has become an article of faith that cooperative, multilateral approaches are the morally superior way to address human righ s problems, while unilateralism is used as a term of condemnation. Since the end of World War II, promoting human rights unilaterally has become equated with national chauvinism and cultural imperialism. Unilateralism is associated with nationalism, which even in its civic forms in liberal democracies is generally seen as inconsistent with the idea of universal human rights, largely due to the influence of Marxism. In State and Revolution, his powerful 1917 pamphlet, Lenin wrote that nationalism is by na ure chauvinistic and intrinsically reactionary.
• Multilateralism in the realm of international human rights refers to the monitoring and “implementation” of human rights standards through international treaties and soft law by intergovernmental institutions and processes. These include UN treaty bodies, the Universal Periodic Review, the Human Rights Council, “special procedures” that focus on specific themes or problems, the International Criminal Court (ICC), and numerous “high level” commissions and officials charged by various international organizations with monitoring human rights. Regional institutions have similar processes, such as the European Union’s “human rights dialogues,” the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe’s “human dimension” process, and those of the Council of Europe’s Parliamentary Assembly and European Court of Human Rights.
• The German government has vigorously championed multilateralism. For example, a white paper issued in 2021 stated:
• The more closely aligned all the relevant parties are in terms of fundamental principles and their own interests, the more dependable and successful multilateral cooperation will be. With the Charter of the United Nations, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the rules of international humanitarian law, the international community has agreed to a set of fundamental common rules and norms and thus established a cornerstone of multilateral cooperation.
• This doctrine was reiterated in Germany’s strategy paper for relations with China in July 2023:
• The rules-based international order is the foundation for balancing interests fairly between large, medium-sized and small cou tries and the prerequisite for peaceful coexistence. It is inclusive, not targeted against anyone, and facilitates cooperation with every country that respects its fundamental principles. The United Nations (UN) and its specialized agencies are at the heart of this order.
• Human rights multilateralism does indeed balance various national interests, but the processes of intergovernmental legal poli ics often degrade the sacrosanct principle of inherent liberty. The next chapter describes some of the resulting problems. On the other hand, institutionalized human rights universalism has engendered some good, illustrating the paradox of universalism.
• The decade of the 1990s appears to have been the high-water mark of international human rights, a window in time when the cont adictions of universalism were largely obscured by rapid but shallow liberalization in many countries. As noted earlier, newly democrat states and the growth of international civil society seemed to portend a universal moral order. Numerous societies around the world began to allow de jure realization of basic political liberties by ratifying international, legal human rights instruments.
• A number of European states that had been subjugated under Communist rule since the late 1940s started transforming themselves into liberal democracies. In doing so, they drew upon political cultures that had not been completely stripped of liberal instincts during four decades of ideological control. While changes in Eastern European and post-Soviet states received the most attention, the liberalizing trend went beyond Eurasia. One observer described liberalizing changes in West Africa during that time:
• The end of the Berlin Wall and a seemingly unipolar world meant that military dictators were deprived of the support they got rom either side of the ideological aisle. To fit into a liberal-led global system, most states in West Africa adopted democratic constitutions and allowed opposition parties to be active once again.
• In the post–Cold War era, human rights was a growth industry—legally, institutionally, and in civil society. I can testify from my own experience that the institutional and multilateral human rights framework was beneficial in multiple ways. I will cite three:
• First, while the human rights treaty system results in states accepting on paper what they do not respect in practice, it gives civil society campaigns a legal foothold for their demands. The treaties and political commitments are “aspirational,” as in the Helsinki process. They are understood not as signifying compliance, but as stating the intention to move toward conformity with standards.
• Dictatorial and authoritarian states sign and ratify human rights treaties to appease international partners and civil society, to mollify local opposition, and to improve their own reputations, often with no real commitment to respecting human rights. The argument in favor of this practice has largely been legalistic: governments may not actually support human rights principles, but by signing treaties and political agreements they give the experts from international bodies and civil society a legal basis for demanding compliance. Governments then present incremental changes, while claiming to need more time and resources to achieve full compliance. Policies on freedom of speech and religion, election laws, criminal codes, prison systems, and other institutions have been changed to reduce abuses and expand individual freedom in the course of bureaucratic cooperation with treaty bodies, special representatives of the UN Human Rights Council, and the UN’s Universal Period Review process.
• The very toothlessness of international human rights law, as optional law that allows wide-ranging derogations and carries no serious penalties, is a dynamic quality that sometimes gets results. The Soviet authorities signed the Helsinki Accords in 1975 thinking they were inconsequential, but the political agreement provided dissidents with a framework for holding the Soviet sta e to account, thus weakening it in the eyes of its citizens and exposing its abuses in international media.
• The positivization of natural law, or the law of nations, has not completely drained it of moral authority and charismatic appeal. International human rights law is respected as an embodiment of universal moral principles or “values.” For example, local activists, international human rights organizations including Amnesty International, and intergovernmental officials succeeded in abolishing the death penalty in most Central Asian post-Soviet states, beginning with moratoriums on the practice. It is difficult to imagine this change happening apart from the internationalization of human rights, including the perception that the death penalty is inconsistent with universal moral standards.
• A second clear benefit of the international human rights legal system lies in allowing the exposure of abuses through civil society statements at international forums, bypassing official lies and propaganda. Abusive regimes suppress the truth about human rights violations at home, but they cannot do so with the same efficacy beyond their borders. International human rights forums permit the efficient distribution of the results of independent human rights monitoring directly to government delegations. The system encourages focused pressure on abusers by other governments, often in a multilateral action.
• A third benefit of the legalized international system is that human rights are supposedly “depoliticized.” This theory really holds true only for civil society actors, who can sometimes transcend domestic politics to identify with a transnational realm organized around universal values. Human rights advocates should not and normally do not promote human rights on behalf of a par isan, power-seeking agenda, but only as a matter of principle, consistent with legal obligations that states have taken upon themselves. The human rights campaign theoretically removes itself from the political picture in a form of self-nullification: insisting that states comply not because activists demand it, but because those states have accepted a legal obligation to comply.
• The early human rights groups in the Euro-Atlantic region, like the Moscow Helsinki Group (founded in 1976), made a point of dissociating themselves from partisan politics and regime change strategies. A hallmark demand of the Soviet-era dissidents was that the USSR must adhere to its own laws. For Leninists, law was a fraud, merely a tool of ideology serving power—which is similar to the basic tenets of Critical Legal Theory. The dissidents asserted that the law stood for something objective.
• Many developments favorable to the enjoyment of liberty occurred during the 1990s, but subsequently the scales have tipped in he other direction. International human rights have become detached from their moral core and therefore subject to political manipulation in the service of ideologies and the whims of tyrants.
• Shortly after the issuing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, Hannah Arendt wrote an essay that would eventually be incorporated into a chapter in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), titled “The Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man.” Here she evinced skepticism about the legitimacy of an international human rights regime—a skepticism likely influenced by her efforts during the Holocaust to save Jews deprived of citizenship, including herself.
• Arendt explained how the French Revolution, which propelled the political internationalization of human rights, ultimately threatened their integrity as a moral principle and impeded their concrete realization. Turning human rights into an international legal order moves them from the spiritual realm to a political arena, in a hubristic project to translate natural law into posi ive law. Arendt wrote that “in the new secularized and emancipated society, men were no longer sure of these social and human rights which until then had been outside the political order and guaranteed not by government and constitution, but by social, spiritual, and religious forces.” Her observation calls to mind the “unshakable sentiment of right,” anchored in religious culture, that Johan Huizinga found in the culture of the late Midde Ages: “Man at that time is convinced that right is absolutely fixed and certain. Justice should prosecute the unjust everywhere and to the end.” Justice and the rights of man were felt to exist in a realm of truth that transcended the power of all earthly rulers.
• Arendt endorsed Edmund Burke’s criticism of the French “Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen” for making human rights an “abstraction.” The concept of human rights that grew from the French Revolution “reckoned with an ‘abstract’ human being who seemed to exist nowhere,” Arendt wrote. “The world found nothing sacred in the abstract nakedness of being human.” These observations are similar to those of Max Scheler, a German Catholic philosopher, who wrote that abstract ideas like “universal love of mankind” actually expressed hatred of societies emptied of spiritual life and fixed moral points of reference. “Experience shows very frequently that children who vainly sought their parents’ tenderness, who felt ‘out of place’ at home … expressed their inner protest through intense enthusiasm for ‘mankind.’” For Scheler, love for one’s neighbor was not a social or political principle at all; it was a spiritual experience in the Kingdom of God. “There is no idea of ‘general brotherhood,’ no demand for a leveling of national distinctions through the creation of a ‘universal community,’ corresponding to the Stoic ideal of a ‘u iversal state (‘cosmopolites’) and a universal law of reason and nature.”
• Arendt maintained that human rights can be effectively defended not in a realm of universalistic abstractions, but only under ational constitutions that guarantee political agency and freedom to citizens, giving them their own place where they have a measure of control over their destiny. To emphasize the point, she focused on the plight of the stateless—refugees and people not recognized as full citizens in their home countries:
• The fundamental deprivation of human rights is manifested first and above all in the deprivation of a place in the world which makes opinions significant and actions effective … where treatment by others does not depend on what he does and does not do. This extremity, and nothing else, is the situation of people deprived of human rights. They are deprived, not of the right to freedom, but of the right to action; not of the right to think whatever they please, but of the right to opinion.
• Arendt perceived that human rights depend on belonging to a community with institutions that recognize and protect those rights. This was a viewpoint shared by some citizens of the embattled new State of Israel, who insisted that international law provided no security for the Jewish people and that only a strong nation-state could do so.
• Today there is much to confirm Arendt’s view of the prospect for international human rights. Global human rights legislation continues to proliferate, but more and more states slide toward autocracy, while liberty shrinks within liberal democracies. As the renowned Polish economist Leszek Balcerovic observed, “We have more rights, but less freedom.” One reason for this trajectory is that human rights universalism has prioritized consensus over natural rights.
• Throughout the history of Western civilization, unity among nations has been judged intrinsically good, but unity in protecting human rights has backfired. Multilateralism in the defense of human rights lends itself to hypocrisy and paralysis. When nations are all bound together and subject to consensus rules, such as those that obtain in the European Union or the UN Security Council, states that want to take unilateral action can do so only by breaking quasi-sacred rules. On the whole, members of the human rights community do not acknowledge, or even realize, that international human rights institutions are dysfunctional to the point of exacerbating the abuse of basic liberties. In the next chapter, I review ways that institutionalized human rights universalism threatens natural rights.
• Chapter 6 Institutionalized Universalism vs. Natural Rights
• As Max Weber taught, the legitimacy of any social order is primarily a matter of belief in its exemplary and binding nature, which supports the obligation to comply with its norms. A universal system of human rights law needs to be seen as enjoying universal consensus in order to be accepted as legitimate. For rights to be understood as human rights rather than local or national or Western, they must be endorsed by all societies, thus validating their universality. From this perspective, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights system lacks legitimacy. According to a leading human rights theorist, the late Joseph Raz, human rights “set limits on state sovereignty and justify accountability across borders.” But a government’s signature on the declaration, or on legally binding human rights treaties based on it, says little about actual commitment to limiting state power over the individual. The international human rights system rests on a false consensus among states, not on political consensus within states and respect for a common law. It is essentially an illusion.
• A “political system of freedom,” whether national or international, “must be accepted by its members as a given,” as received moral knowledge, according to Edward Shils. Yet the international human rights system has no place in any nation’s cultural tradition, and no compelling force of law, since it lacks the elements of government. “Human rights,” the “abstract” rights of man as a transnational and transcultural being, a “citizen of the world,” have only a weak moral force. The voice of human rights in the free West is no longer a prophetic call to honor the natural right to freedom; instead, human rights are viewed as legal rights. The voice of human rights in the global, “universal” system is a disenchanted voice of technocratic political and legal disputation and compromise.
• In the internationalist era, free and democratic states have conflated the universality of human rights with universal entitlement to membership in human rights bodies. The definition of human rights continues to be corroded by a toxic mix of ideological progressivism and rigid commitment to political unity and harmony, which gives legitimacy to state policies as being grounded in obligations to universal humanity. Regimes that largely control international human rights institutions flatly deny the core principle of freedom from coercion as an inherent natural right; it is conditioned and diluted by expansive international human rights legislation mandating that states provide services to specific groups as collective rights. Human rights in this form can serve as a legal trump card in democratic politics. The political-legal universalism of the human rights system has emptied human rights of meaning and left only a hollow moral exoskeleton. It has demonstrated that human rights cannot be subjected to a multilateral definition and still survive intact as a moral principle, given the diversity of political cultures involved in decision-making human rights bodies.
• In fact, the “practical consensus” that permitted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to gain approval in 1948 was short-lived. The declaration had been greeted with deep skepticism among newly decolonized states, some of whose leaders and traditional elites called it a form of neocolonialism. Louis Henkin, an authority on the subject, noted that international human rights as legal rights established in the UN system derive from liberal constitutionalism, but the concept was exported to societies that showed no commitment to its theoretical underpinnings. The question of fidelity to the foundational principles of the UDHR was willfully ignored for the sake of consensus. In the decades since the document was signed, the promise of movement toward compliance with the standards it sets forth has not materialized. Instead, resistance to the principle of inherent natural rights has become more acute, as political tensions grow between free and authoritarian states.
• That is the “fundamental cleavage” referenced by Leo Strauss in 1964 when he wrote about the risks associated with intergovernmental formations designed to achieve peace and promote human rights:
• For the foreseeable future there cannot be a universal state, unitary or federative…. [T]he federation that exists [the UN] masks the fundamental cleavage. If that federation is to be taken too seriously, as a milestone on man’s onward march toward the perfect and hence universal society, one is bound to take great risks supported by nothing but an inherited and perhaps antiquated hope, and thus to endanger the very progress one endeavors to bring about.
• Paradoxically, the effort to achieve global progress by way of international institutions can be counterproductive and injurious to free societies. The danger posed by international institutionalization was that Western societies would lose their purpose, and fail to make concrete progress toward respect for universal rights, when the meaning and application of those rights was diluted and subverted by nondemocratic partners. Strauss therefore recommended being “satisfied for the foreseeable future with a practical particularism.” In view of the threats facing it, Western society should focus on self-preservation and self-improvement.
• The subsequent development of international human rights has validated Strauss’s points about the risks of trying to create a “perfect” and “universal society.” The world’s “fundamental cleavage” between free and unfree political cultures has been persistent. As a consequence, the universal body has incrementally adapted the principle of human rights to accommodate political diversity and sustain the illusion that human rights are universally respected.
• Since the UDHR was published, there has been ongoing debate over “cultural relativism” in human rights, including the question of whether “Asian values” can be reconciled with the principle of individual rights. The Bangkok Declaration of 1993 posed a “serious challenge” to the international human rights movement by “calling into question the universality of its normative claims.” Spearheaded by the governments of Singapore and Malaysia in preparation for the 1993 World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna, the document was heavily influenced by China and supported by thirty-four countries. It presented “Asian values” as a political ideology based on social harmony, collectivism, and respect for authorities, and it asserted that economic and social development were preconditions for progress in human rights. The declaration also affirmed the principles of sovereignty and noninte ference in internal affairs, saying that human rights norms must be promoted by “cooperation and consensus.”
• At the time, liberalization was occurring in many societies around the world, in part due to the promotion of international human rights standards and engagement by civil society and governments in international human rights processes. But this progress has been overshadowed by the degree to which illiberal regimes exploit human rights legislation and the prestige of the UN to legitimate themselves and undermine freedom and democracy. Rather than reform their policies through international cooperation on human rights, authoritarian and tyrannical governments have corrupted the concept and practice of human rights, using international human rights to sustain their own power and even call into question the fundamental liberties enjoyed by citizens of free societies. International human rights have become a pretext for increasing the reach of the state into society in the name of “economic and social rights.” Imported into the global system on the wings of Christian social gospel teachings and progressive ideology, these new rights have been rationalized as the price that liberal regimes must pay to ensure participation by communis states and maintain the illusion of unity.
• As a result, the principle of inherent natural rights has been essentially “deplatformed” in an international arena where a majority of governments are described as “consolidated authoritarian.” In 2023, Freedom House found that global freedom had declined for the seventeenth consecutive year. Civil society human rights campaigns have become stuck in the Venus flytrap of interna ional human rights, seeking leverage from institutions that lack coercive power and have little legitimacy among repressive governments.
• While international human rights treaties and soft law proliferate, human rights violations also multiply, and the trends are causally related. Utopian universalism has inflated the concept of human rights beyond a narrow negative freedom from coercion to encompass an open-ended list of entitlements under positive law. Within a quasi-legal international, bureaucratic order, the principle of a natural right to individual freedom has been subjected to the ravages of moral equivalence at the hands of rulers whose arbitrary power it threatens.
• The postwar global system of human rights was intended to be “postnational,” despite words about the centrality of national sovereignty in UN documents. The postnationalist illusion, similar to Friedrich Engels’s notion of the “withering away of the state,” centers on the idea of a uniform world system where common human rights law and standards defined by multinational expert bodies will supersede national constitutions and positive law. Borders will become meaningless, as they violate human rights by restricting choice, movement, and economic freedom. “All people should be free to move about the earth, uncaged by the arbitrary lines known as borders,” wrote Alex Tabarrok in the Atlantic in 2015. The Russian fascist philosopher Aleksandr Dugan warned that the world was heading toward a blurring of differences: national and religious identity were threatened by transnationalism, while sexual identity was threatened by transpersonal ideologies.
• Yet state sovereignty with regard to the question of individual human rights has not disappeared. Neither abusive treatment of citizens nor revanchist imperial aggression has been tamed by the UN Charter, human rights treaties, civil society human rights monitoring and advocacy, or dialogue about cultural differences. Instead, despotic regimes have adapted international law to their own purposes, justifying violations of natural rights and paralyzing civil society. Under the guise of a global moral consensus, the international human rights system has allowed dictators to leverage the moral sway of human rights law and institutio s in ways that serve their own interests.
• The United Nations was a “dangerous place” for America and Israel, and for human rights, according to Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Jeane Kirkpatrick, both of whom served as U.S. ambassadors to the global organization. In his November 1975 speech denouncing the passage of General Assembly Resolution 3379, which equated Zionism with racism, Moynihan said that “the United Nations is a place where lies are told, but far more serious, grave, and perhaps irreparable harm will be done to the cause of human rights itself.”
• The immediate source of this problem lies in the “heterogeneous universality” of the UN’s legal and institutional human rights system, and in the tradition of institutional universalism. This inclusive principle was appropriate for an international forum convened to keep peace, a purpose requiring neutrality in a morally ambiguous framework that imposes rules against aggression. Nominally neutral intergovernmental human rights institutions, embodying the legitimacy of universal law, have served the cause of freedom in civil society by documenting and condemning the actions of abusive regimes. But the UN’s human rights institutio s and legal initiatives were inserted into a global ideological battleground from the start. The same goes for human rights bodies attached to regional intergovernmental organizations, which have become increasingly paralyzed by member states that need to repress freedom in order to maintain regime control.
• Woodrow Wilson had imagined that a world organization might mirror the federal structure of the United States, but similar uniying principles could not be translated to a global scale. The United States had formed a union on the basis of the Declaration of Independence, which expressed a consensus on natural rights and limited government by consent, and which would be the moral foundation of the U.S. Constitution. While the Founders had differing ideas about the proper distribution of authority, they broadly agreed on honoring inherent rights to liberty. The United Nations, on the other hand, declared human rights to be its basic law after the institution had already been formed and a frame of unity was in place. Membership did not rest on a moral consensus. Human rights standards were “aspirational,” aiming for moral and legal transformation.
• A self-reflective liberal democracy will monitor its own human rights practices. Civil society is a power against the state, a d criticizing state violations of individual rights under such governments is not considered a sign of disloyalty, as it is under despotic regimes. Another central political principle of liberal democratic societies is that human rights questions cannot e subject to majority rule; democracy alone does not guarantee respect for human rights. But in the United Nations, human rights decisions are submitted to a vote. Policies are decided by ballot both in the UN Human Rights Council and in the Third Commit ee of the General Assembly, which deals with “a range of social, humanitarian affairs and human rights issues that affect people all over the world.” The outcomes are influenced by loyalties and conflicts among states, power politics, and economic exigencies.
• Daniel Patrick Moynihan noted that a shift in the dynamics of the United Nations had occurred by the mid-1970s. The exercise o power by a “tyrannical new majority” of UN member states that emerged in the early 1970s turned efforts at objective analysis of global social and economic problems into ideological weapons against liberal Western democracies. “What was being asserted was a radical discontinuity with the original, essentially liberal vision of the United Nations as a regime of international law and practice which acknowledges all manner of claims, but claims that move in all directions,” wrote Moynihan. “Now they moved in one direction only,” i.e., against liberty. Reflecting on Moynihan’s tenure as ambassador to the UN half a century later, Douglas Murray remarked, “Thugs and autocrats and antisemites have always viewed the United Nations as a cudgel meant to batter the West.”
• In the UN human rights system, actions that ideally would be guided by impartial evaluations based on universal standards and international legal obligations are instead influenced by national political agendas. There are double standards and selective enforcement, in which some nations are held to account while others get a pass because of political alliances or economic partne ships. This is the politicization of human rights, a result of embedding human rights in a political combat zone.
• In addition to the Human Rights Council, the UN’s human rights system includes nine major universal treaties; the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), which services treaty bodies and carries out human rights work on a global scale; the International Criminal Court (ICC), which tries individuals suspected of war crimes, genocide, or other crimes against humanity; and the International Court of Justice (ICJ), which adjudicates disputes between nations.
• There is no global constitutional court to adjudicate on alleged violations of legal human rights obligations, and some observers regard this as a gap in the international human rights architecture. Several prominent human rights lawyers and UN officials have proposed such a court. Their plan appears to be modeled on the European Court of Human Rights, which rules on compliance with the European Convention on Human Rights, a treaty embraced by the member states of the Council of Europe. The proposal for a World Court of Human Rights has never gotten traction. If it did come into being, some of its judges and prosecutors would be placed in their roles by states likely to use the court for political purposes.
• In fact, the existing International Criminal Court (ICC), established in 2002, has been subject to politicization as a consequence of political heterogeneity. Despite its members’ common accession to a treaty, the court is not sustained by a consensus on principles of justice and is susceptible to being abused. I took part in the promotion of the ICC by human rights NGOs, and I vividly recall the late Marek Nowicki of the Polish Helsinki Foundation saying that the role of human rights organizations vis-à-vis such a court should not be to zealously accuse and prosecute, but rather to ensure that the accused get a fair trial. It is virtually impossible for an international human rights court to render decisions based only on the law, since members tend to rule in accordance with their national interests. Even if judges strive to be impartial, their decisions will be viewed by one side or another as political and unfair, expressing particular cultural values rather than universal ones. These institutions cannot rise above intergovernmental legal politics.
• Politicization of international courts occurs despite the effort to achieve balance, or because of it, as shown by the Interna ional Court of Justice. Commonly called the World Court, the ICJ was established in 1945 to adjudicate disputes between nations. It consists of fifteen judges nominated by national representatives and elected by the UN General Assembly and the Security Council (voting separately). Article 2 of the ICJ Statute stipulates that the judges “must be elected from among persons of high moral character, who possess the qualifications required in their respective countries for appointment to the highest judicial offices.…” Article 9 mandates that “representation of the main forms of civilization and the principal legal systems of the world should be assured.” Diversity of national and political culture is considered essential to the court’s legitimacy.
• This mandatory diversity embeds politics in a court meant to establish a realm of transcendental justice. Instead of canceling out bias, it makes the outcomes of cases a matter of vote-counting among often divergent legal traditions. Scholars have documented the problem of culturally inculcated values and national biases in international courts, which Hersch Lauterpacht called “one of the most urgent problems of the political organization of the international community.” A quantitative analysis in 1968 found that ICJ justices showed “a definite tendency to support their countries,” rarely ruling against national policy, most likely because of cultural preferences rather than overt political instructions. In 2005, Eric Posner and Miguel de Figueres showed that ICJ judges “vote for states that are similar to their home states” in terms of culture and political regime. Generally speaking, they do not vote impartially, but rather in line with their state’s national interests. South Africa, long a partisan supporter of Palestinian claims against Israel and a state having warm relations with Hamas, filed a case in December 2023 accusi g Israel of committing genocide in Gaza. The case was widely viewed as intergovernmental “lawfare.” According to Alan Dershowitz, it showed that the ICJ “is not a real court,” but instead an institution that “reflects foreign policy, not rule of law, not judiciary.”
• Since there is nothing to compel states to abide by rulings from international courts, they typically do so only when those rulings align with their own interests and alliances. For example, states beholden to Russia have refused to arrest Vladimir Putin after his indictment by the ICC for crimes against humanity in Russia’s war on Ukraine. The Kremlin’s press secretary forthrightly gloated about the court’s impotence: “This whole story with the ICC ... cannot and will not be a limitation in the development of Russia’s relations with partner states that are interested in developing bilateral relations and covering international contacts.” (In 2016, Russia had withdrawn its signature from the Rome Statute, which established the ICC, in response to a repo t on its annexation of Crimea.)
• Though not a signatory to the Rome Statute, the United States “tends to hail the ICC when it prosecutes American enemies, but assails the court when it goes after U.S. allies,” in the words of Sarah Leah Whitson, a human rights activist.
• Washington has cooperated when the ICC has targeted U.S. adversaries. Indeed, when the ICC issued arrest warrants against officials of other non-ICC member states, like Russian President Vladimir Putin and former Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir, the U.S. government celebrated those decisions and urged cooperation with the court. Indeed, U.S. President Joe Biden “welcomed” the ICC’s arrest warrant for Putin for war crimes in Ukraine and ordered the U.S. government to start sharing information about possible Russian war crimes with the court.
• On the other hand, the U.S. Congress voted in January 2025 to sanction the ICC over its arrest warrants for Israeli leaders on charges of war crimes in Gaza. The ICC described Congress’s action as an effort “to undermine the court’s independence, integrity and impartiality.” President Donald Trump claimed in an executive order that the ICC’s charges against Netanyahu were baseless given that Israel was not a party to the Rome Statute.
• The tendency toward selective cooperation and enforcement undermines the “rules-based international order.” It contributes to a widespread belief that the ICC and the ICJ are little more than “theater[s] of partisan political activism.” They are the courts of societies coexisting in a jungle of competing interests, not the courts of a civil society unified around a consensus on central values. British theologian Nigel Biggar has observed that international courts are an object of cultic worship by liberal Western governments.
• The formal recognition of universal human rights did not signal an end to any of the normal interests or inclinations that drive politics among nations, such as the protection of sovereignty, security, and regime stability. It is natural and inevitable, then, that human rights questions in the United Nations have always been subject to interstate politics or in their shadow, con rary to the stated missions of the institutions.
• An official UN document sets forth the intentions behind the founding of the Human Rights Commission:
• The United Nations Commission on Human Rights was established in 1946 to weave the international legal fabric that protects ou fundamental rights and freedoms. Composed of 53 States members, its brief expanded over time to allow it to respond to the whole range of human rights problems and it set standards to govern the conduct of States. It also acted as a forum where countries large and small, non-governmental groups and human rights defenders from around the world voiced their concerns.
• As early as the 1950s, observers noted that members of the commission, though charged with neutral surveillance of human rights issues, were using the institution to pursue political agendas and were loath to open themselves to scrutiny and criticism. The commission was able to scold small and weak states for their abuses, but not large and powerful ones—an affront to the principle of equality among UN member states. In the 1990s, the commission experienced a surge in activity. Many cases of grave abuse were discussed in confidential hearings, yet the commission took few formal actions in response; neither China nor Saudi Arabia, for example, was condemned.
• A report issued in 2005 by the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung in Germany found that the Human Rights Commission had become “increasi gly paralyzed in addressing human rights violations around the world.” It quoted the UN secretary general, Kofi Annan, saying that the commission had “cast a shadow on the reputation of the UN system as a whole.” Among the commission’s main failings, the report listed:
• selectivity, double standards, politicization (political considerations far from human rights aspects) and obstructive regional divisions which impede adequately addressing serious human rights violations related to particular countries; states seeking election to the Commission to protect themselves against criticism or to criticize others; [and] states using procedural ploys o prevent debate on human rights concerns.
• Other critics said that the commission had turned into “a battleground of interrelated political contests that pitted East against West and North against South.” At one point, Libya gained the chairmanship, and Sudan served as a member while engaging in policies that many claimed were genocidal. According to a U.S. State Department fact sheet, “The UN’s own bureaucratic inertia combined with poorly designed membership rules and regional alliances that sought to undermine the commission’s work gradually reduced it to what legendary human rights advocate Congressman Tom Lantos called a body, ‘Orwellian in its character.’”
• A reorganization was considered necessary, yet apparently it was almost universally believed that tinkering with the mechanics of the institution to secure political support from illiberal regimes would solve the problems. In his call for reform, Annan “echoed the assertions of institutionalists and constructivists” who believed that international organizations “have a prominent role in making public the extent to which governments comply with prevailing norms, rules, treaties and regulations.” He argued that “public shaming creates pressures for government to conform with societal norms within the international community.”
• The Commission on Human Rights was replaced with the Human Rights Council in 2006 under General Assembly Resolution 60/251. Whereas the fifty-three members of the commission had been elected by the Economic and Social Council, the new body consisted of forty-seven states elected by the General Assembly, a victory for universalism. The resolution established the Universal Periodic Review process, requiring that the human rights record of every UN member state be reviewed every four years, thus putting all states under equal scrutiny. Every state is to be reviewed with regard to a report from the Office of the High Commissioner on how many UN treaties it has signed and other indicators of integration into the UN human rights system, as well as reports from civil society.
• The membership rules for the Human Rights Council mandate diversity with “geopolitical regional quotas.” Seats on the council are divided in an “equitable geographical distribution” among five regional groups, and the General Assembly votes by secret ballot from among the states presenting themselves as candidates for the open seats in their region. Regarding membership criteria, the resolution says:
• [M]embership in the Council shall be open to all States Members of the United Nations; when electing members of the Council, Member States shall take into account the contribution of candidates to the promotion and protection of human rights and their voluntary pledges and commitments made thereto; the General Assembly, by a two-thirds majority of the members present and voting, may suspend the rights of membership in the Council of a member of the Council that commits gross and systematic violations of human rights… ; [M]embers elected to the Council shall uphold the highest standards in the promotion and protection of human rights, shall fully cooperate with the Council and be reviewed under the universal periodic review mechanism during their term of membership.
• The formation of the Human Rights Council had broad support among a range of actors, from independent human rights organizatio s to authoritarian governments. At its opening session on June 21, 2006, government delegations from several states that do not respect human rights stressed that the new council promised less “naming and shaming,” “politicization,” and “selectivity,” and more “dialogue” and “cooperation” on “thematic” (rather than country-specific) issues. According to the delegate from Singapore,
• All needed to recognize that no one nation or group of nations had a monopoly over human rights. The inclination of some to impose their local values and practices as universal norms would provoke resistance and politicize the process. Finding common ground in human rights systems required a deep knowledge of each other's cultures and value systems.
• The delegate from Egypt asserted that “it was imperative to respect different cultures and civilizations on the basis of the p inciples of tolerance and acceptance of the other, as well as in the right of all peoples to choose their own value systems.”
• But just as the Human Rights Commission had been called “Orwellian,” a prominent human rights advocate in the U.S. Congress, Representative Chris Smith, used the same term to describe its replacement. He noted, inter alia, that the new model would make even more likely the election of states that violate human rights and that Western nations would have less power.
• Some observers see the rule of apportioning seats by region as a foundational fault, leading to the presence of human rights violators on the council. Some complain that the member states of regional groups conspire to ensure that there are only as many candidates as there are open seats for their region in an election. In 2020, for example, there were a total of sixteen candida es for the fifteen available seats. This practice makes elections mostly noncompetitive and is “undermining” the council’s “credibility” and “effectiveness,” in the words of Human Rights Watch.
• Truly reforming the UN Human Rights Council will prove impossible as long as the body is broadly representative and inclusive, since politicized approaches to human rights are intrinsic to the political cultures of a large majority of the world’s societies. Even states that respect the need for objectivity in evaluating and adjudicating human rights problems cannot detach themselves from their own national interests. Some individuals have the capacity to respect universals, but states do not behave as individuals. According to Brett Schaefer, an expert on international organizations,
• Neither the U.S. nor any other nation has proposed a concrete plan or offered a General Assembly resolution to implement insti utional changes to the HRC.… [T]he many countries who are pleased with the status quo of a weak, politicized HRC are likely to have their way. Reform will face an uphill climb for the foreseeable future as it is not just in the HRC that nondemocratic sta es have a majority; they also dominate the General Assembly.
• But the problem with the Human Rights Council and other international human rights bodies isn’t simply the presence of bad actors. The bigger issue is the moral relativism inherent to any all-inclusive, multilateral human rights system structured by legal positivism. In recent years, both progressive Western governments and dictatorial ones, like Cuba, have promoted the creation of deeply ideological Human Rights Council “special procedures” or “mandates,” which often are led by people who undermine their purpose of defending basic freedoms.
• The result has been to increase state power rather than individual freedom. For example, in an echo of the most radical Stoic utopian visions, a UN special rapporteur on the right to education suggested that religious traditions and institutions limit individual moral choice but universal norms that merge the value systems of families with those of the state do not—a viewpoint that echoes radical Stoic totalitarianism. The rapporteur called
• “the need to respect the community’s cultural and religious values” a “concern,” given the “challenge” of ensuring that “the concerns of different groups can be expressed without imposing personal moral values on the general public since this compromises the individual’s freedom to choose a lifestyle.” This means that “undue influence” from ecclesiastical authorities and the “false dichotomy between family and state” must be broken down—with the clear consequence being the erosion of the freedom of conscience in particular.
• Another example of expanding state power in the name of human rights: A special rapporteur on the right to freedom of expression claimed that freedom of speech “does not protect ‘the narrative of “protection of the family”’ in Africa or calls in Eastern Europe for ‘protecting the “natural” family’s rights.’” As David McGrogan summarized the special rapporteur’s thinking,
• Freedom of conscience, expression and association may be manifested only in such a way that they accord with the strictures imposed by the state, and which always—by definition—lead to the maximalisation of self-interest and the atomisation of all individuals from any ties of loyalty beyond that which they owe to Power itself.
• This means that the state may legitimately limit speech that challenges its own power, without running afoul of the UN’s human rights philosophy.
• The institutional principles that govern the Human Rights Council and make it unable to address human rights violations effectively are central to preserving unity and cooperation in the UN. Operating by the rules of multilateralism, inclusivity, regulated diversity, and sovereign equality among nations, the UN protects autocratic regimes while often propagating visions of coercive universalism at odds with the principle of natural rights.
• The main threat to freedom posed by the UN is not radical progressive special rapporteurs, but rather the way that the unified approach to protecting human rights has been hijacked by regimes hostile to human rights and to liberal democracy. Meaningful action to protect human rights is rare, while the dogma of collective action discourages forceful unilateral responses to abuses. Rights-denying regimes have come to understand that multilateral human rights institutions offer them cover rather than holding them into account.
• According to Hillel Neuer, director of the independent group UN Watch, who has tirelessly called these facts to international attention, “European diplomats say it’s good for the U.N. Human Rights Council to be a big tent, allowing countries like Iran, China, Russia and Venezuela to join, learn and improve.” Cuba, Pakistan, Russia and Uzbekistan—all notorious for abusing human rights—were among the fourteen states elected to the Human Rights Council in 2020. As a result, 60 percent of the states in the world’s top human rights institution did not meet “the minimal standards of a free democracy,” according to Human Rights Watch. In the General Assembly secret ballot, Cuba won 88 percent of the vote, Pakistan and Uzbekistan both won 87.5 percent, Russia won 82 percent, and China won 72 percent. A Chinese government propagandist observed that these outcomes reflected “the will of the global community.” Roland Gomez, who served as president of the council, noted that its legitimacy derives from its diversity and expressed satisfaction that a majority of UN members would have served on the body once the new cohort was installed.
• In 2023, it was decided that the Islamic Republic of Iran would chair the Social Forum of the Human Rights Council. Iran was elevated to the presidency of the UN Conference on Disarmament in 2024. Qatar, an absolute monarchy that “oppresses women, abuses migrant workers, and fuels Jihadi terrorism,” was re-elected to the council for the sixth time in 2024, supported by 88 percen of the General Assembly. The Asia-Pacific Group, which includes Qatar, was the only regional group where there were more candidates than open positions that year. Saudi Arabia’s unsuccessful bid to join the council was seen as “an effort to boost the country’s rights reputation abroad.” But the Saudi kingdom has actively subverted the work of the council, lobbying to shut down investigations of war crimes in Yemen and Sudan. In 2024, Saudi Arabia was chosen by acclamation to chair the UN Committee on the Status of Women despite its “abysmal” record on women’s rights.
• When illiberal and dictatorial UN members are reviewed in the Universal Periodic Review, the public proceedings are overwhelmed by propaganda that mostly drowns out any independent analysis presented by civil society. While civil society groups can submit documents for review, the evaluations of states are based on formalistic criteria, such as UN treaties signed and bureaucratic cooperation with UN agencies. But in the end, the politics of the Human Rights Council governs outcomes. According to Brett Schaefer,
• There is no accountability in the UPR process or means to reject falsehoods. According to a database compiled by UPR Info, ove the past three cycles of the UPR, the U.S. has received far more recommendations (1,025) for improving its human rights than any other country, which would imply that the U.S. human rights record is the worst in the world. Cuba (890), Egypt (867), Iran (849), and China (809) trail significantly. Although the U.S. is far from perfect, any process that ranks U.S. human rights concerns as more troubling than these authoritarian regimes cannot be considered objective.
• Republican administrations have twice withdrawn the United States from the UN Human Rights Council, citing the presence and inluence of rights-abusing states and disproportionate criticism against the State of Israel. Astonishingly, Israel has been targeted with about the same number of critical resolutions as the total number condemning all other states, which in large part relects the power of the fifty-seven-member Organization of Islamic Cooperation in the UN. Facing a competitive election in the fall of 2024, the United States opted not to seek another term on the council and risk a likely defeat in the General Assembly. In effect, the U.S. seems to have been forced out because of its support for Israel after the 2023 Hamas program.
• The state whose influence has become the most deleterious to the UN’s human rights program is clearly the People’s Republic of China. Aiming for global dominance, China has been increasingly active in the Human Rights Council and has sought leadership in other UN agencies, intensifying its efforts to reshape international human rights institutions and the understanding of human ights. First elected to the council in 2006, China has used this position to protect itself from criticism, degrade democratic states, and undermine human rights. It has mobilized client states to give voice to Orwellian characterizations of its abusive practices, attempting to change the global understanding of known facts by a show of political power.
• When China’s human rights record was examined under the Universal Periodic Review (UPR) in 2018, the delegation cited economic growth as evidence of human rights compliance and described the concentration camps in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, where as many as three million Muslims were incarcerated, as “vocational skills education and training institutions.” I observed the event at the Palais des Nations in Geneva. At the end, Beijing was loudly applauded, and Chinese diplomats praised the meeting format as “inclusive, cooperative, nonselective and nonconfrontational.”
• Each time China has been reviewed under the UPR, its representatives have blatantly lied about conditions in the country. In January 2024, the Chinese diplomat Chen Xu asserted,
• China upholds respect for and protection of human rights as a task of importance in State governance, fostering historic achievements in the cause of human rights in China…. We uphold the equality of all ethnicities, respect the religious beliefs of the people and protect the lawful rights and interests of all ethnic groups…. China is developing whole-process People’s democracy in all respects, and its people carry out democratic elections, consultation, decision-making, management and oversight .…
• Since its founding, the Human Rights Council has “never created a commission to investigate or even passed a single resolution criticizing China,” although Freedom House gives it “the second-worst political rights score of any country in the world.” China has used its massive economic leverage to thwart any action concerning the plight of the Uyghurs. Efforts by the UN high commissioner for human rights, Michelle Bachelet, to investigate the situation and interview victims ran into roadblocks. When she finally visited China in May 2022, Bachelet did not go to Xinjiang, but instead echoed Chinese Communist Party (CCP) propaganda. According to the Chinese Foreign Ministry, “Xinjiang-related issues are not human rights issues at all, but issues of counter-terrorism, de-radicalisation and anti-separatism.” Bachelet likewise referred to the camps as “counterterrorism” facilities and as “vocational educational training centers.” She also spoke of China’s “tremendous achievements” in advancing human rights.
• China’s vice foreign minister, Ma Zhaoxu, said that the high commissioner’s visit “enhanced understanding on China’s path on human rights development,” and that it “set forth China’s proposition for global human rights governance” as one “respecting different countries’ paths.” For the Office of the High Commissioner, the mission was essential to sustain the illusion that the success of the UN’s human rights program is demonstrated by incorporating the states that most seriously challenge the principles it nominally upholds. Afterward, the UN published a weak report on the situation in Xinjiang. Some Western nations then led a motion to hold debate on the subject, but China exercised its political and economic muscle to defeat the motion in the Human Rights Council. A Western delegate noted that the Chinese had “camped out” at the gates of the Mexican ambassador’s residence befo e the vote, in which Mexico abstained.
• Dismayingly, China’s genocidal policies toward its Muslim population in Xinjiang have gotten consistent approval from the Orga ization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), which is the world’s second largest intergovernmental formation after the UN itself and claims to represent the interests of Muslims. For example, in 2019, when ambassadors of fifty states signed a letter to the president of the Human Rights Council and the high commissioner for human rights expressing support for China’s treatment of the Uyghurs, twenty-eight of the signatories were members of the OIC. In the letter, “the ambassadors commended China for its putatively effective counterterrorism and de-radicalization measures, and strong guarantee of human rights.”
• The Chinese regime obviously does not subscribe to the principles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. As noted in Chapter 5, the country’s communist leaders regard the UDHR as an imposition of Western liberal ideology on the world. China’s policy is to promote the principles that guide the Chinese Communist Party in an effort to make them universal, or at least universally tolerated.
• On December 8, 2021, China hosted a “South-South Human Rights Forum,” which offered a window into what the CCP means by human ights and what it is trying to accomplish with its human rights propaganda. First and foremost, the CCP’s understanding of human rights is totally detached from the obligation of governments to protect individual freedom, the principle that still undergi ds the Universal Declaration, despite the contradictions resulting from the importation of “economic, social and cultural rights.” The Chinese concept explicitly rejects inherent natural rights in favor of human rights as government policies that reflect “national conditions.”
• All the speakers at the South-South Human Rights Forum promoted economic development and welfare policies as the essence of human rights. Zhang Weiwei, a political scientist at Fudan University, emphasized that there can be no individual rights without collective rights and said that individual rights such as freedom of speech need to be restricted in the common interest. Zhang claimed that the United States and other Western states pay no attention to economic and social rights or problems like poverty alleviation. (He was apparently unaware that President Donald Trump’s State Department Commission on Unalienable Rights had firmly endorsed the economic and social rights set forth in the UDHR.)
• Tom Zwart, a professor at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, argued that human rights should be dissociated from “liberalism.” International human rights have hitherto been a “liberal social engineering project,” he said, but this interpretation was now “losing its grip.” He went on to praise Xi Jinping for promoting global “harmony” by bridging different civilizations.
• Speakers showed how the CCP is using its human rights ideology to forge a new global order dominated by China. Mohammad Yunus, a Bangladeshi banker, called for “global human rights governance,” saying that problems such as global warming, wealth inequality, and unemployment due to artificial intelligence can be addressed only by centralized global regulation in a “zero-profit” civilization. A former foreign minister of Kyrgyzstan said that such a vision of global unity and harmony “originated from China.” A former prime minister of Guyana praised China as an example of a “new democracy” that is “putting people first” and should e a model for the world.
• The speakers all praised multilateralism—except when it threatened authoritarian regimes. For example, Hector Rosales, ambassador to the UN from Venezuela, used much of his speaking time to denounce the “responsibility to protect” doctrine, an effort to specify when the international community may intervene to save populations at catastrophic risk from “from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity.” It had been unanimously endorsed by the General Assembly in 2005, but Rosales condemned the doctrine as itself a “crime against humanity.”
• While Russian authorities have not engaged ideologically with UN human rights institutions to the same degree as China, Russia has tried to manipulate them for its own purposes. The Russian Federation was elected to the Human Rights Council in 2006, the year it was inaugurated. As UN Watch has pointed out, this was the same year that the journalist Anna Politkovskaya, who had st ongly criticized President Vladimir Putin, was assassinated on his birthday, which few people believe was only a coincidence. Russia was reelected in four subsequent council elections through a period of increasing and violent repression, including the poisoning and assassination of dissidents.
• Following the full invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the General Assembly adopted a resolution calling for Russia to be suspended from the Human Rights Council. Of 193 member states participating, 93 voted in favor of the resolution, 24 voted against, and 58 abstained. Before the vote, Gennady Kuzmin, the Russian deputy ambassador, called upon other countries to “vote agains the attempt by Western countries and their allies to destroy the existing human rights architecture.”
• In 2023, Russia announced the intention to seek a position on the Human Rights Council again, despite what UN Watch described as its
• repressive laws designed to suppress political opposition and dissent; government restrictions on media freedom; restrictions on freedoms of expression and assembly; denial of citizens’ rights to choose their representatives in free and fair elections; the assault on and occupation of Ukraine and related violations; prosecution of individuals for supporting Ukraine’s government or criticizing Russian policies in the occupied Ukrainian territories; politically-motivated denial of due process to anti-Putin defendants; discrimination against racial, ethnic, religious and sexual minorities; government prosecution of LGBT persons; to ture at detention facilities; overcrowded and substandard prison conditions; executive branch pressures on the judiciary; human trafficking; discrimination against people with disabilities; and harassment of civil society.
• According to an official government statement, Russia would “consistently uphold the principles of cooperation and building co structive mutually respectful dialogue with states in the Council to find optimal solutions to current human rights issues.” The Kremlin was playing to the obsession with unity and cooperation that has overtaken adherence to human rights principles in multilateral institutions. This time, Russia’s bid failed in the General Assembly vote.
• After the invasion of Ukraine, Russia was also excluded from the Council of Europe, a body composed of states that have signed the European Convention on Human Rights. The Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs took steps to leave the council the day before the expulsion, and its statement reveals how the Kremlin understood the contradiction in the organization’s mandate. Russia claimed that the council “was created to consolidate the unity of European peoples … as a depoliticised entity destined to become the humanitarian and legal fabric of Greater Europe from Lisbon to Vladivostok.” Russia alleged that European Union and NATO members of the council were transforming it into an “anti-Russia policy tool, while rejecting dialogue on equal terms.”
• The Council of Europe’s Parliamentary Assembly (PACE) had suspended Russia’s voting rights before. First it was in 2000 and 201, because of atrocities committed in the Second Chechen War. In 2014, PACE removed Russia’s voting rights in response to the annexation of Crimea and Russia’s support for separatists in Ukraine’s Donbas region. Russia subsequently threatened to withdraw from the Council of Europe altogether. In 2019, the council voted to restore Russia’s voting rights, with support from France and Germany. The Ukrainian delegation called it a “moral victory for the Kremlin.” But the French minister for EU affairs, Amélie de Montchalin, said that France “wanted to preserve the pan-European dimension of the Council of Europe” and to “consolidate unity.” Then, apparently insensible to the contradiction, she followed by saying, “We don’t do geopolitics here, the values we defend are human rights values.”
• The purpose of the Council of Europe, as mentioned previously, is “to achieve greater unity between its members for the purpose of safeguarding and realising the ideals and principles which are their common heritage and facilitating their economic and social progress,” and one of the means for doing so is by “the maintenance and further realisation of human rights and fundamental freedoms.” Since 1989, the council has often put geopolitical interests above fidelity to human rights principles.
• The Council of Europe was first established in 1949, with strong backing from Winston Churchill, as a bulwark against totalita ianism and specifically against communism. It was to be a moral community of states committed to clear standards for protecting fundamental liberties and the rule of law. Article 3 of its statute says, “Every member of the Council of Europe must accept the principles of the rule of law and of the enjoyment by all persons within its jurisdiction of human rights and fundamental freedoms, and collaborate sincerely and effectively in the realisation of the aim of the Council.” The rights enshrined in the European Convention on Human Rights, which all members have signed on to, were drawn from a list proposed by Pierre-Henri Teitgen, a French resistance fighter.
• First formed by states that generally shared a common political and religious culture, the Council of Europe has diluted its own principles by expansion. With immense goodwill and naivete, the council admitted a number of states not because they conformed to the standards of the club, but in the belief that they would progress toward conformity through legal and bureaucratic cooperation. The same aspirational reasoning that animated the Universal Declaration of Human Rights led quickly to the inclusion of Turkey, in 1950. While I was the executive director of the International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights in the early 19 0s, the council considered applications for membership from former members of the Soviet bloc and some former Soviet republics. Most did not meet the official criteria. In some cases, our organization opposed inclusion because it would degrade the standa ds of the council and remove an incentive for further reform. But the argument that such states should be “transformed from within” the group, along with pleas for admission from Western-oriented officials and civil society representatives in those states, almost always prevailed. Several dubious admissions were made, including Bulgaria and Romania (1992), the Russian Federation (1996), Armenia and Azerbaijan (2001). It seemed that our principled opposition to premature integration was viewed as heretical, a threat to unity and progress. Exclusion is painful and invites political conflict, while welcoming sinners sends a message of generosity, tolerance, and hope.
• Most people in the human rights community have endorsed the admission of noncompliant states because it provides individuals with access to justice through the European Court of Human Rights. It is a powerful argument. In fact, abused Russian citizens have won a series of cases before the court. Others argue that premature admission has not changed state practices but instead has removed the incentive to reform, while creating an illusion of human rights compliance. Indeed, reform stalled in some new members; others slid backward, the most dramatic example being the Russian Federation. At the same time, the principles and standa ds on which the Council of Europe was founded have been diluted and confused, as seen in judgments by an increasingly activist European Court of Human Rights. For example, this court ruled that the right to “peaceful enjoyment of possessions” includes a ight to welfare benefits. In fairness, original members of the council seem to have driven some questionable decisions that violate human rights rather than uphold them. But the council’s purposes are not well served by admitting members whose understanding of human rights is at odds with the principles of the European Convention.
• A clear line connects Russia’s foreign and human rights policy with the core tenets of Eurasianism, an outlook that advocates a distinctly Russian civilizational approach to political culture, law and international relations, in conscious opposition to Romanic and Germanic Europe. The principles of Eurasianism were first set forth in the 1902s by Prince N. S. Trubetskoy, a Russian linguist who was then teaching in Vienna. Trubetskoy rejected the notion of a “universal civilization” and believed that Russia needed to dissociate itself from European liberalism. He held that liberal cosmopolitanism was just another form of chauvinism, a highly particularized cultural egocentrism wherein European civilization saw itself as the center of the world. Eurasia, on the other hand, was conceived as a “distinct and fundamental cultural entity, entirely independent from Europe.” It was not a political empire but a “harmonious, symphonic organic association of peoples which constituted a higher historical and cultural unity.” Within the boundaries of this “ideocratic” state, unified by the Russian language, “the issue of separatism lost its meaning.”
• The philosophy of Eurasianism explains Russia’s assault on Ukraine, which is viewed as inseparable from an “organic” Russian civilizational unity. It also explains the Kremlin’s approach to international security and human rights.
• In a 2021 article in Kommersant, Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, played Eurasia’s sex card, claiming that students in Western countries “learn at school that Jesus Christ was bisexual.” He accused the West of promoting “totalitarian rule in global affairs,” and he made a plea for a “multipolar” and “polycentric world” where human rights standards are not universal, ut particular to distinct civilizations. After all, the West “had its own ‘rules’ in the Balkans,” where NATO began a bombing campaign without Security Council approval in 1999 after Serbia refused to accept a diplomatic solution in Kosovo at Rambouillet. Russia’s criticism of the West has been echoed by Victor Orban, the prime minister of Hungary. For example, in August 2023 he asserted, “Today, Western values mean three things: migration, LGBTQ and war.” He further said that "the universal values of the US are laughed at by the Chinese.”
• Since its full-scale invasion of Ukraine began, Russia has repeatedly affirmed its commitment to the UN Charter and internatio al law, which it views as properly falling under the purview of the UN Security Council, in which it assumed the former Soviet Union’s permanent seat and veto power. What Russia rejects is the “rules-based international order” that reflects specifically Western values and interests, seeing it as a threatening and intrusive particularistic universalism that Trubetskoy warned about decades before the formation of the modern global governance system. While Russia claims to abide by the UN Charter and Securi y Council resolutions, it regards the human rights treaties and norms of the “rules-based order” as “boundless and amorphous” standards based on Western civilizational principles that are incompatible with those of Eurasia, notes Philip Remler, a former American diplomat. Russia interprets the UN Charter as affirming that “the legitimacy of recognized governments is absolute regardless of their origins, governance, human rights record, or any other external norm.”
• In 2023, Russia invoked the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide to justify its invasion of Ukraine. The Kremlin has no problem defending international law when it can shield Putin’s regime from challenges to his iron rule. The international order upheld by the Russian Federation is one that regulates relations between states, but does not inte vene in relations between individuals and their government, nor call into question the legitimacy of a state that deeply encroaches on individual freedom.
• Though the Kremlin’s approach to human rights is clearly self-serving, the Russian critique of the international human rights order should elicit serious reflection from all who are interested in working through the paradoxes of human rights universalism. Decades of human rights inflation and ideological exploitation have indeed resulted in “boundless and amorphous standards,” some of which stray far from the universal right to individual freedom. Instead, such standards reflect the ambitions of interest groups promoting ideologies that are inconsistent with the core principles of human rights.
• UN and other intergovernmental human rights mechanisms are targets of “regulatory capture,” a process whereby interest groups seek to gain influence in regulating bodies. Authoritarian states use international human rights treaties and institutions like the UN Human Rights Council as instruments for projecting power. “You have to be in it to win it,” said Marc Limon, executive director of Universal Rights Group, a civic group headquartered in Geneva, where the council is based. “That’s why China wants to be there, why Russia wants back in.”
• The Chinese and Russian regimes both heavily promote “multilateralism” as a way of increasing their own power. One observed no ed that Russia “figures at every turn in multilateral institutions.” Another said that Russia is pursuing a “non-normative, ad hoc, tactical multilateralism, detached from any commitment to ‘common values.’” There is no international civil society of nations, only a state of nature, where multilateralism can be used to create illusions of harmony that distract and weaken adversaries. For Russia, multilateralism is a way to “minimize the risks and pain of standing in the shadow of others” as it seeks to regain the status of a great power.
• The Chinese approach to multilateralism likewise emphasizes adherence to the UN Charter, but not to human rights norms. In a 223 speech, the minister of foreign affairs, Qin Gang, stated:
• We need to practice true multilateralism, uphold the UN-centered international system and the international order based on international law, and observe the basic norms of international relations underpinned by the purposes and principles of the UN Charter…. We need to promote the sound development of globalization, reject unilateralism, protectionism and attempts to decouple o sever supply chains, and ensure the stable and smooth operation of industrial and supply chains.
• Since the founding of the People’s Republic of China, multilateralism has featured prominently in the country’s rhetoric of in ernational relations, as discussed in an article that I co-authored with Jianli Yang, a Chinese dissident scholar and activist. Aiming to become a hegemon, China has strategically used multilateralism as an “equalizer,” a way of uniting the “small and weak” to balance the influence of the superpowers, mainly the United States.
• The Chinese Communist Party’s diplomatic strategy of promoting multilateralism in its own national interest has served several immediate goals: getting a seat at the United Nations (1971), expanding economic cooperation (while disregarding internationally accepted rules), and gaining accession to the World Trade Organization (2001). But during Xi Jinping’s rule, China has used its economic strength to advocate for multilateralism, as a vehicle to export the “China model” in the economic, political, and even human rights fields, and as an ideological weapon against the United States.
• China is exploiting multilateralism to give its ambitions a false moral veneer. In the face of American ambivalence toward or outright rejection of multilateralism, Xi Jinping saw an opportunity to replace the United States as the world’s prime guardian of the “rules-based international order.” China assumed the posture of defending the international community against “unilateralism.” At the seventy-fifth session of the UN General Assembly, in September 2020, Xi promised:
• China will continue to be a true follower of multilateralism. It will stay actively engaged in reforming and developing the global governance system. It will firmly uphold the UN-centered international system, firmly uphold the international order underpinned by international law, and firmly defend the UN’s central role in international affairs.
• But in his messages to constituents at home, the promotion of multilateralism has morphed into a nationalistic war cry against putative American unilateralism. In what was described as a “fiercely nationalistic” speech marking the seventieth anniversary of China’s entry into the Korean War against American forces, Xi said, “In today’s world, any unilateralism, protectionism, and ideology of extreme self-interest are totally unworkable, and any blackmailing, blockades and extreme pressure are totally unworkable.” He also denounced “any actions that focus only on oneself and any efforts to engage in hegemony and bullying.”
• Xi superimposed deep Chinese feelings of historical victimization onto a bed of pro-multilateralism rhetoric. It thus behooves us to understand how multilateralism is understood by China’s rulers and how it has been weaponized in the service of China’s aggressive foreign policy.
• At a symposium on August 27, 2018, on the fifth anniversary of the launch of the Belt and Road Initiative—a massive infrastruc ure project intended to stretch around the globe—Xi Jinping said:
• Promoting the building of a community of human destiny with the Belt and Road as a practical platform is in line with the concept of universal peace, which the Chinese people have always upheld, and with the Chinese people’s worldview that is to subdue with soft powers other nations, near and far, and bring in harmony with all nations.
• Xi Jinping has linked his proposal to build a “community of human destiny” with the traditional Chinese cultural concept of the world, or “all under heaven.” The ancient Chinese did not conceive of a world made up of separate political societies, or believe that there were other countries in the world equal to themselves. As with some other early empires, they saw only inferior arbarian groupings beyond their domain, which ought to depend on China and be assimilated by China.
• If this ancient worldview reemerges as an operational model for China’s international relations, it will imply legitimizing the subversion and control of other societies, and indeed the existing international order. It is deeply significant that Xi Jinping talked about the Chinese concept of the world at a conference on promoting “One Belt, One Road”—a strong indication that the Belt and Road Initiative is not just about doing business but is driven by a hegemonic political agenda. China under Xi Jinping’s rule has exposed both its internal autocracy and its expansionary impulses. It appears that multilateralism, for Xi, is mainly a fig-leaf to obscure the reality of international realpolitik.
• Given the Chinese regime’s broad assaults on the most basic liberal standards and practices of governance, it should be clear hat allowing China to become the standard-bearer for multilateralism is untenable. But what is also clear is that multilateralism means several things. Some multilateral bodies, foremost the UN General Assembly, are inclusive forums where the equal rights of all members allow all voices to be heard; where war and aggression are denounced and possibly avoided through diplomacy; where dialogue and information sharing are organic conflict-prevention processes; where citizens can see their governments partake in symbolically important rituals and debates; where diversity, equality, and sovereignty are guiding principles.
• Multilateral processes in regional intergovernmental organizations formed on the basis of shared political values and human rights standards have been marginally more successful at protecting human rights than have the UN’s global institutions. During the Cold War, the Council of Europe helped fortify the democratic and human rights principles of Western European states threatened by Soviet subversion. The organization was weakened, however, by a rapid expansion in the 1990s to absorb postcommunist states that did not meet the membership standards, but were admitted in the expectation that they eventually would. It began to show the problems of heterogeneous universality that have plagued UN human rights institutions from the start.
• The international human rights system has created the illusion that human rights are most legitimately protected by internatio al law and institutions—an illusion that pacifies civil society with the virtue of political neutrality, while focusing attention on an abstract “international community” rather than on national political practices. International human rights institutions engender expectations about how they might discipline oppressive regimes, diverting the energies of civil society away from the arduous task of democratic reform or regime change and miring them in processes that offer little beyond minimalist advances.
• In my work with local human rights organizations in post-Soviet states, institutions like the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe were repeatedly called upon to “do something” about abuses and to provide remedies for victims. Local and international activists generally seek change in the form of statements, resolutions, reports, demarches, the appointment of officials and committees, and other actions by international bodies meant to put pressure on offending regimes. Of course, changing national laws is another objective. Many new laws have been passed in transitional societies, but regimes accommodate themselves to their own laws passed under international pressure; they often do not implement such laws, any more than they abide by international law to which they have acceded. While progress toward respect for human rights is measured by legislation, those laws often mask continuing human rights abuse.
• The internationalization of human rights has sucked much of the oxygen out of human rights politics at the national level. Advocates do not put their energies into local partisan politics because they believe that human rights work should be nonpartisan, politically neutral and detached from the question of power. Nothing stops partisan political activity from giving priority to the issue of defending human rights, but the human rights campaign conforms to the view that civil society and nation-states need to achieve human rights objectives at the international level through multilateral processes. It is widely believed that human rights advocacy needs to be embedded in a web of multilateral processes, while unilateral pressure to end human rights abuses is suspected to have political aims. Multilateral approaches to human rights are seen as morally superior to unilateralism, which is associated with chauvinist cultural imperialism.
• Civil society has thus focused most of its advocacy on largely symbolic activity by a narrow range of actors who are far removed from the struggles of women and men facing repression. Human rights campaigners tend to view violations of human rights in terms of international law, which is regarded as the highest and most legitimate authority. My colleagues in this profession defe d laws, but avoid referring to any moral or philosophical foundation of human rights law—essentially adhering to the tactic used by Jacques Maritain to gain consensus on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It is paradoxical that the human rights community, often seen as the quintessential representatives of independent civil society and ostensibly dedicated to the cause of freedom from state coercion, is so deferential to international institutions and their enforcement mechanisms. The language used by activists is generally arid and technocratic. They almost never speak of abuses of human rights as being “wrong” or “evil” or “immoral,” or as violations of natural rights. They view the human rights obligations of states mainly as international legal obligations rather than moral obligations.
• Ritualized contributions to bureaucratic intergovernmental processes, such as providing reports for UN treaty body deliberatio s, UN special mandates, human rights “dialogues,” and Universal Periodic Review sessions, serve as much to validate the bureaucratic order as to support victims and their right to freedom. Human rights “experts” today is a kind of priestly class with access to authoritative texts who interpret arcane case law, since the subject has become too complex for ordinary people to grasp. These experts are typically people who live off human rights, rather than for human rights, to follow a distinction from Max Weber’s “Politics as a Vocation.” Indeed, human rights has undergone what Weber called “disenchantment.” It has lost its connection with central moral and religious imperatives, specifically the imperative of individual natural liberty. The outer dimension of human rights has been extensively elaborated; the inner dimension has been desiccated.
• Under the influence of political-legal universalism, the international human rights regime has become not an ally of civil society, but its policeman and prosecutor. Extending far beyond the protection of basic atural rights, it has turned into an ideological super-state aiming to obliterate other centers of loyalty. Like a totalitarian regime, it confronts religious and cultural values in such areas as sexual education, in a utopian quest for equality. Here, expressed in contemporary form, is the nightmare that Edmund Burke saw in the French Revolution, or perhaps worse: a scheme compelling all nations to conform to abstract universal rights, making revolution a universal demand. But core freedoms, which are actually universalizable natural rights, are obstacles to the forced freedom envisioned by Rousseau. UN special rapporteurs seek limits on basic rights that allow citizens o defend their religious and cultural beliefs and institutions.
• More and more, the institutionalized universalism of international human rights is proving to be an enemy of natural rights and freedoms. We cannot afford to avert our gaze from the dysfunction of the international human rights system. In September 2024, in remarks at a meeting in Geneva about protecting religious minorities, I made a brief reference to the proliferation of huma rights, a process that has been driven by misguided universalism in order to fuse social rights and collectivist policies onto the human rights framework. One of the UN special rapporteurs approached me afterward to advise against making “divisive” comments, which he said hurt the human rights cause. The suffocating conformism afflicting the civil society human rights community is part and parcel of ideological human rights universalism; it has created a conspiracy of silence about a UN system that does not serve to promote basic rights and freedoms. People who are committed to defending human rights have a choice: continue supporting a system that does not work, or promote human rights without illusions, the subject of our next and final chapter.
• Chapter 7 Toward a Spontaneous Order of Human Rights
• Responses to the massacre by Hamas terrorists in Israel on October 7, 2023, tragically confirmed the dysfunction of internatio al human rights as an institutional process. The systemic moral equivocation of institutionalized universalism was on full display, and thus its self-negation. Members of the UN Human Rights Council observed a moment of silence at a meeting days after Islamist terrorists slaughtered around 1,200 people, but did not mention who the victims were. The deputy permanent representative of Pakistan to UN institutions in Geneva made this statement:
• On behalf of the IOC [Organization of Islamic Operation] member states, we express our deep concerns over the loss of innocent lives in the occupied Palestinian territory and elsewhere. Regrettably, this huge loss of lives and unabated violence is a sad reminder of more than seven decades of illegal foreign occupation, aggression and disrespect for the international law, includi g UNESCO resolutions.
• There was no acknowledgment of the fact that the “innocent lives” lost were mostly Israeli citizens. Worse, the massacre was rationalized as a consequence of “occupation.”
• In the course of their pogrom, “pre-civilizational” terrorists, as Victor Davis Hanson called them, murdered forty babies, some by decapitation or by burning alive. But the politics of the United Nations prevented any clear moral condemnation of the atrocities. UN officials refused to use the term “terrorist” to describe the perpetrators, or even name Hamas. Instead, the high commissioner for human rights referred to “Palestinian armed groups.” The Security Council could not agree on a consensus statement about the attacks. In the Human Rights Council, the Israeli diplomat Michal Mayaan objected to statements made by representatives of Iran, Syria and the Palestinian Authority blaming Israel for the violence. “Sitting among us today,” she said, “are representatives of murderous regimes who celebrated the death of my people, who applauded the butchering of entire families.… I will not take morality lessons from them.”
• Gerald Steinberg and Anne Herzberg of NGO Monitor observed that civil society formations like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty I ternational had not unequivocally condemned the massacre, but instead “weaponized” the human rights framework to condemn Israel. “Modern antisemitism has learned to hide in its moral opposite: the language of human rights,” as Gadi Taub remarked. The European Union was unable to find an unambiguous moral stance regarding the slaughter of Jews by Hamas terrorists. Human rights multilateralism results in de-moralizing human rights violations with neutral language as the only common denominator. When Iran a tacked Israel with over 180 ballistic missiles on October 1, 2024, the UN secretary-general vaguely condemned the “broadening of the Middle East conflict.” Representing the entire UN membership, he could not muster more than an abstract, anodyne response, free of moral judgment.
• The prosecutor of the International Criminal Court sought arrest warrants on war crimes charges for leaders of Hamas, but also, to be even-handed, for the prime minister and the defense minister of Israel. Never mind that Israel is not a signatory to the Rome Statute establishing the ICC, and that while a “State of Palestine” had signed it, such a state did not legally exist. The court interprets its own rules in ways that serve prejudicial claims. Polish officials vowed to arrest the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, if he visited Auschwitz in January 2025 to mark eighty years since its liberation. They later reversed course. But their original position reflected the values of what Ruth Wisse called the “ideological-political anti-Zionist consortium that dominates the United Nations.” A poll by the Jewish News Syndicate found that 84 percent of Israelis judged the ICC to be a political body, not a legal one. Given that a majority of the 193 members of the UN General Assembly oppose the State of Israel, the global body and its intergovernmental courts cannot be expected to deliver justice.
• The conflict in Israel and Gaza brought into focus the contradictions that paralyze global human rights institutions, and also the dark side of unity. Heterogeneous universality in global human rights institutions requires the presence of regimes that subvert human rights at home and sabotage an easily manipulated legal, bureaucratic system. The moral principle of universal, natural rights has been eroded, even inverted, by the project of defining and implementing human rights universally. At the same time, the human rights system fosters illusions that discourage movements for political freedom in oppressive societies—specifically, the illusion that a state’s mere participation in the system promotes human rights. Today, dictatorial and collectivist state that reject the idea of inalienable rights are among the most enthusiastic supporters of international human rights institutions.
• We have defined universality not in moral standards but in political and legal terms, like empires of the past, and the resulting “liberal international order” has been turned against the ideal of liberal democracy. But we have no positive visions of a future for international human rights defense. The very concept of human rights, the central pillar of liberalism, is in serious need of refreshment. Can there be a morally coherent and politically feasible approach to defending universal, natural rights that is not tied to universalist visions of unity and saddled with their paradoxes? Can we imagine the defense and promotion of universal human rights apart from global institutions and international law?
• At this point, simply raising the question is the most important step forward. The next necessary step is a prophetic simplification, a return to the principles of the old classical liberalism that inspired America’s revolutionary generation. Governments and civil society need to stop expecting global institutions to defend inalienable human rights. Liberal democracies need to retrieve the cause of human rights from morally equivocating international bureaucracies that subject it to a poisonous mix of coercive progressive utopianism and exploitation by unfree regimes. Human rights activists need to engage with the internal politics of states that are in the grip of oppressive regimes, and openly acknowledge that individual rights and freedoms will never be protected in those places without regime change.
• We bear a duty to defend human rights, as Kant taught, but we also have a duty to recognize the dangers to universal human rights posed by collectivistic universalism. There will never be universal respect for universal human rights, but governments and civil society can take action toward increasing the number of states that honor natural rights and embrace a pluralistic national liberalism, where universalism is rooted in a particular political culture and enforced by constitutional principles, laws, and courts. On that basis, a spontaneous order of free societies can emerge.
• The Hamas pogrom of October 2023 showed “what the world is like when the global liberal order fails,” as Robert Tracinski wrote. The goal of the postwar international order had been to replace “the anarchy of unbridled and discordant nationalism” with “international rules of morality, law, and justice,” in the words of Cordell Hull, the U.S. secretary of state who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize as the “father of the United Nations” in 1945. The United States and other democracies, along with NGOs, would become the most important “norm entrepreneurs propagating global norms around issues of good governance, democracy and human rights,” as described in an article coauthored by Madeleine Albright, former U.S. secretary of state.
• In the 1990s, the growth of international civil society and the appearance of newly democratic states suggested the developmen of a universal moral order, a fulfillment of the ideal that Western leaders had envisioned at the end of World War II. Even such atrocities as the massacre of eight thousand Bosnian Muslims by Serbian military forces at Srebrenica in 1995 did not destroy optimism about the global future. According to John Mearsheimer, the period between 1990 and 2004 constituted the “golden years” of the liberal international order, but liberal internationalism started to decline in 2019. The editors of a volume titled Is the International Legal Order Unraveling? (2022) located the beginning of this trajectory earlier: “Since about 2008, we have witnessed significant backsliding toward a more sovereignty-based order, especially in the areas of international trade and i ternational human rights law.”
• Following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Jakub Grygiel declared that “there is no such thing” as a ules-based international order; it is only a “myth.” Later that year, Andrew Latham, a professor of international relations, commented:
• The United Nations Security Council is paralyzed; the norm prohibiting wars of aggression has been shattered; the institutions governing the global economy are faltering under the weight of repeated financial crises; and even stable regional organizations like NATO and the European Union are experiencing unprecedented centrifugal forces that are threatening to tear them apart.
• Brett Shaefer of the Heritage Foundation documented that “interest in UN peacekeeping” had declined since 2015. He predicted that opposition from Russia and China on the Security Council would likely drive it down further, to levels not seen since the end of the Cold War. A couple of months before the Hamas terrorist attack, Eli Clifton, a senior adviser at the Quincy Institute, remarked that the international order was “in irreversible free fall.”
• While evidence accumulates that the “rules-based international order” is cracking up, there is little discussion of alternatives in the form of another constructed international system. Indeed, Francis Fukuyama notes that geopolitical conditions for the creation of a new world order do not exist. At the same time, little attention is paid to the intrinsic problems of any enginee ed intergovernmental system.
• Defenders of what is considered the current world order have urgently demanded its repair. “Our world is becoming unhinged,” warned the UN secretary-general, Antonio Guterres, at the General Assembly meeting in September 2023. “Geopolitical tensions are rising. Global challenges are mounting. And we seem incapable of coming together to respond.” Guterres called upon world leaders and the United Nations to “evolve to meet the challenges of the era.” Worrying about further “fragmentation,” he said that a multipolar world needs strong, effective multilateral institutions where all countries work together to solve global problems.
• Observers took note that the U.S. president, Joe Biden, was the only leader from among the members of the Security Council who bothered to address that General Assembly meeting. The Biden administration was most vocal in urging respect for the international rules-based order, which is generally considered an American project. The U.S. secretary of state, Anthony Blinken, vigorously defended international institutions as arbiters of universal principles. In a speech at George Washington University in May 2022, Blinken said:
• [W]e must defend and reform the rules-based international order, the system of laws, agreements, principles and institutions that the world came together to build after two world wars to manage relations between states, to prevent conflict, to uphold the rights of all people. Its founding documents include the UN Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which enshrine concepts like self-determination, sovereignty, the peaceful settlement of disputes. These are not western constructs. They are reflections of the world’s shared aspirations.
• There has been virtually no suggestion of replacing the current rules-based order with a different model of international rela ions and human rights. Despite all the talk about the disintegration of the postwar “rules-based order,” the ideal of a global, institutional human rights system seems to retain the support of liberal governments, while despotic regimes exploit it to rei force their own power.
• What is now commonly acknowledged as a fracturing of the rules-based international order could in fact turn into a positive development for individual freedom and national sovereignty. It provides an opening for a human rights campaign that does not rely on international bodies and rules, but instead works through national political cultures, drawing inspiration from the moral example of free societies and fueled by the innate human resistance to coercion. As the dysfunction of the international human rights regime saps its credibility, there is opportunity for liberal democracies to try a more effective, unilateral approach to promoting human rights, and for civil society activists to support national political struggles to form rights-respecting governments.
• The breakup of the international order confirms the wisdom of the old liberalism, which recognized the limitations and the dangers of intergovernmental superstructures. That liberalism offers moral principles for nations to follow in a global state of nature, as well as models for promoting natural rights apart from intergovernmental superstructures that subvert them. Universal human rights, or natural rights, are protected only in a liberal state where women and men can find what Hannah Arendt called “a place in the world which makes opinions significant and actions effective,” a society where citizens have a voice in the power structure that is responsible for guarding their liberty and security.
• The current international human rights system, on the other hand, derives from a tradition of universalism going back to the time of Diogenes that regards the nation and its conventions as obstacles to achieving a world in harmony with nature. In this tradition, the customs of a community must be subordinated to universal moral law. Today, transnational moral projects have demea ed both national sovereignty and individualism. Progressive governments have sought to use international human rights law to constrain constitutional individual liberties. Intellectuals in Western societies have expressed revulsion toward their own socie ies, while indulging in utopian dreams of a perfect society. The lovers of “mankind” often have little use for people, just as utopian proponents of “universal freedom” have made people slaves to arbitrary power.
• A misguided understanding of universalism has set up a false opposition between natural rights and the traditions and politics of national communities, or between human rights and nationalism. While “nationalism” can encompass a variety of approaches to human rights and pluralism, the nationalist tradition is generally understood as antithetical to the ideal of universal individual liberty, and to universality itself, giving primacy to local traditions, languages and customs. For example, according to the libertarian scholars Alex Nowrasteh and Ilya Somin, “Real‐world nationalism is a primitive, statist, protectionist, anti‐capi alist, xenophobic, and often ethnocentric proto‐ideology of ‘my tribe best, your tribe bad,’ with the tribe lying at the core.” They describe nationalism as an ideology of group rights that denigrates individualism in favor of an abstraction called “the ation,” wherein individuals have no identity apart from the national group.
• There is assumed to be an antinomy between nationalism and natural rights, an extension of the friction between tradition and liberty as seen with what Edward Shils called “a deforming, simplifying rigidity” that associates tradition with limits on individuality and creativity. But as Shils observed, a “free society must rest, once it comes into existence, on tradition,” specifically, a democratic tradition that “entails a critical independent attitude toward authority,” a tradition of casting a respectfully critical eye on tradition itself. In short, “Liberty lives in the context of order, and order, beneficial to liberty, is maintained by traditions.” The nation is worthy of honor and loyalty insofar as it protects freedoms that are universal.
• Defenders of natural law as a “higher court” have been able to transcend their historical circumstances to spotlight abuses of natural rights by despotic regimes, but the moral power of this higher court is felt only when couched in the idioms of one’s own culture and religion. The German natural law theorist Heinrich Rommen observed that in the Nazi era, “all attempts at passive and active resistance to the regime were necessarily grounded on natural law ideas or on divine law, for legal positivism as such could offer no foundation.” The White Rose student movement, formed in Munich in 1942, based its moral critique of Nazism o the tradition of German humanism; the movement’s universalism was furnished with the language and ideals of a strand of German culture that obligated the state to protect individual moral freedom. They appealed to fellow citizens as members of the same moral community, a “civilized people” who acknowledged the ancient principle, repeated by Schiller, that the purpose of the state was “the development of man’s powers,” and that interference by the state in the progress of the human spirit was “reprehensile.” One of the leaflets distributed by the White Rose group said that every individual is entitled to a state that secures his or her freedom, for “according to God’s will, man is intended to pursue his natural goal, his earthly happiness, in self-relia ce and self-chosen activity, freely and independently within the community of life and work of the nation.” Whereas Rommen points to “natural law ideas or divine law” as more powerful than legal positivism, the story of White Rose suggests that “natural law” has no resonance apart from a particular cultural tradition.
• Human rights internationalism has promoted the ideal of human rights and endowed it with a form of legal legitimacy, but has also made it an alien and abstract concept with limited ability to touch our souls. At the same time, this abstract concept has the potential to fuel a global, legal regime with totalitarian implications. For Edmund Burke, the idea of human rights “represe ts the notion of a universal law which leaves no place for circumstance as a determining factor,” as Justine Lacroix and Jean-Yves Pracnchere summarized it. In Reflections on the Revolution in France, Burke wrote that it is impossible to judge an object such as liberty “stripped of every relation, in all the nakedness and solitude of metaphysical abstraction. Circumstances … give in reality to every political principle its distinguishing color and discriminating effect.” Yet he also referred to the natural rights of men as “sacred,” grounded in natural law. What he rejected was the conceit that human rights had meaning outside of a particular context. In Burke’s England, the moral imperative of natural rights had gradually insinuated itself into the culture as a shared aversion to ill-treatment by the state, becoming intrinsic to the national identity. Universality was thus incarnated in the rights of Englishmen. Based on tradition and common law, the English constitution was “a particular configuration of universal and particular values.”
• Inherent, universal rights have no meaning outside of an effective jurisdiction. As the late Roger Scruton wrote, “We have rights that shield us from those who are appointed to rule us—many of them ancient common-law rights, like that defined by habeas corpus. But those rights are real personal possessions only because government is there to enforce them—and if necessary to enfo ce them against itself.” Human rights are “indeterminate in the absence of authority and institutions that can adjudicate and enforce rights claims.” Such institutions hold effective power in a delimited area. Respect for human rights and enforcement of hose rights can exist only within borders that clarify moral and legal obligation, defining zones where the rule of law obtains. When distinctions between nations are broken down, the principle of natural rights is deprived of grounding in particular society and thus loses its cultural meaning and power. National sovereignty is a necessary precondition for liberty.
• Hannah Arendt noted that people in Christendom could be certain that justice existed in the spiritual realm, but they had few if any legal, worldly means to secure their rights. On the other hand, secular, liberal-democratic societies claim to protect many rights, but the sacred foundations of those rights have eroded. Arendt commented on the “perplexity” of constitutional and legal rights that are based on natural, inalienable rights, which in turn are grounded in ultimate truths. The American Revolution, inspired in part by the rights of Englishmen, provided a solution to this perplexity. The United States is blessed with universal human rights that are protected by a national constitution. In Arendt’s terms, Americans have “a place in the world which makes opinions significant and actions effective.” At the same time, in Burke’s terms, Americans have “inherited rights” that a e both culturally particular and universal, deriving from a natural rights tradition.
• Studying the young American republic, Alexis de Tocqueville saw that the exercise of rights in a democracy represented the sense of liberty merged with a civic spirit, or what might be called “civic nationalism.” Yoram Hazony has observed that “nationalism is built into the framework of modern liberalism, because the rights and prerogatives of individuals are constitutively tied to a discrete people that authorizes or legitimizes that government which acts as the guarantor of those rights and prerogatives.” The defense of natural rights depends on a national political culture that understands citizens as innately bearing such rights and entitled to justice regardless of social and economic standing or political influence, and on governing structures designed to respect the rights of citizens.
• The ongoing delegitimization of the international human rights system should prompt a turn toward understanding natural rights in concrete terms that resonate with particular cultural and religious traditions, and to viewing the defense of human rights as a task of national constitutional law. Under the conditions of a social contract, national courts are the institutions most capable of defending the first principles of inherent, individual liberties. Heinrich Rommen explained how courts should be the guardians of rights where a constitution makes even an implicit reference to an “order of values” that transcends positive law:
• Insofar as the constitution is based on, contains, or refers explicitly or implicitly to suprapositive norms or fundamental co stitutive principles of the law itself, the judiciary is entitled in its specific function of interpretation and concretization to appeal to universal philosophical and ethical propositions, to an objective order of values transcending all positive law.
• Where fundamental principles, once acknowledged, are not honored by positive law, the judiciary should enforce those principles.
• The courts should be independent of the executive and legislative branches of government. Judges in an independent judiciary “enforce the law and resolve disputes without regard to the power and preferences of the parties appearing before them.” Alexander Hamilton stressed the importance of judicial independence in Federalist No. 78:
• This independence of the judges is equally requisite to guard the constitution and the rights of individuals from the effects of those ill humours which the arts of designing men, or the influence of particular conjunctures, sometimes disseminate among the people themselves, and which, though they speedily give place to better information and more deliberate reflection, have a tendency, in the mean time, to occasion dangerous innovations in the government, and serious oppressions of the minor party in the community.
• The independent court is guided by a principle of detachment from particular interests and transcendence over partisanship. This principle will always be attacked as an obstacle to the fulfillment of political agendas that are blocked by constitutional rights and powered by ressentiment at transcendence. The idea of independent courts upholding an objective realm of law has been denigrated by totalitarian ideologies as a mask for existing power structures. Progressive movements have griped when courts of law shield individual rights from encroachment.
• The independent court in a liberal democracy should be the domain of the wise, who as members of a self-reflective national community can place themselves outside its politics and hold all parties to the standards of universal moral law. Judges must be capable of rising above their own biases. Images of Lady Justice show her blindfolded, unable to see the person who is on trial. The blindfold prevents the engagement of prejudices and thwarts an emotional response. Since Greek antiquity, Lady Justice has been depicted with a set of scales for weighing evidence—a neutral instrument to boost her powers of rational judgment. In esse ce, she is not a normal human, but a technologically enhanced being stripped of personal feelings, and thus able to decide cases objectively by reason.
• Lady Justice is just an ideal, of course. In reality, the problem of bias is perennial in both domestic and international cour s. During his infamous and unsuccessful Senate confirmation hearings in 1987, Judge Robert Bork made balanced and measured observations about this issue, noting that the metaphorical blindfold worn by Lady Justice requires moral self-discipline. “We all see the world and facts through a lens composed of our morality and understanding,” he said. But despite this “inevitable bias,” judges should strive for objectivity by a “self-conscious” effort to keep their biases to the side. Bork contrasted this principle with self-conscious efforts to use the law in service to a judge’s political agenda, noting that such exercises of “judicial activism” had come to be favored among legal academics. He worried that courts were setting social agendas, usurping the role of citizens’ representatives in the legislature and thus weakening democracy itself.
• National constitutional courts are agents of civil society. Their rulings define the boundaries between civil society, which is governed by law, and the state of nature, where raw power reigns. International human rights institutions are dominated by tyrannical majorities, with no higher authority standing over nations to judge them, as Thucydides, Thomas Hobbes, and John Locke all observed. This truth is “repugnant to civilized values,” notes David Fromkin. Since ancient times, it has spurred various efforts to design a universal system of justice. But the absence of a real global authority does not negate the principle of universal natural rights or the moral obligations it imposes on each of us to defend those rights.
• When I began working in Eastern Europe in the early 1990s, I commented to a Polish colleague that we encountered many Americans who were involving themselves in human rights campaigns and the reform of communist institutions. He said the reason for this was that “they care.” That simple remark seemed unremarkable at the time, but it has remained with me as an expression of a deep and complex truth.
• “They care” brings to mind the Stoic concept of oikeiosis, which means finding things that are familiar outside one’s own community as a basis for sympathy and alliance. People who have appreciated freedom in their own land can recognize a yearning for liberty where it is denied, as Thomas Paine and others found among men and women who lived under corrupt monarchical rule. The bearers of a natural rights tradition that stands against state coercion felt the right to liberty as a moral precept, a “given” of natural law. On this basis, they empathized with people around the world who were struggling for freedom. Indeed, many of those American human rights activists in Eastern Europe had ancestors who had left or were driven from the same region when it was under Nazi or communist tyranny.
• In order to promote respect for human rights abroad, liberal democracies ought to focus mainly on protecting individual freedom through domestic policy, and thus recover the indispensable power of example. Today, models of respect for natural rights are tarnished and damaged. Civil society has failed in conspicuous ways to meet the moral challenges of the old liberalism, which p edicated restraint by the state on mutual respect and tolerance among citizens—that is, on the wisdom of natural law.
• That old liberalism has been mischaracterized as a philosophy that only promotes natural rights to individual freedom, without the constraints of reason-based natural law. Contemporary critiques of liberal human rights principles often start from Burke’s views on the problem of “abstract rights.” Shocked by the excesses of the French Revolution, Burke declared that “the asserted absoluteness of natural rights is a recipe for the dissolution of society.” Abstract rights, he said, “challenge moral, legal, and constitutional traditions” and “give the mantle of moral authority to a reckless, utopian political idealism, which licenses anarchy and thereby creates the conditions for tyranny.”
• The idea that human rights are a threat to morality is a common refrain among people who worry about moral relativism and the decay of tradition. Some accuse human rights advocates and libertarians of setting up a slippery slope toward a world without fixed moral points of reference. This criticism often comes from religious communities—custodians of sacred and moral principles—who seem to blame moral profligacy on human rights standards and compliance campaigns intended to protect liberty. But those campaigns aim to keep the moral choices of religious communities themselves out of the reach of state control.
• A modern form of illiberalism that calls for religiously based state intervention to shape the life of civil society is essentially little different from the leftist progressivism that for well over a century has sought to undermine constitutional freedoms and impose an administrative state on the democratic society. It encourages tyranny and pulls the rug out from under freedom movements that need to square claims for individual freedom against the moral demands of their society’s traditions. Such political freedom movements have been the only force that has ever established societies respecting human rights.
• Today, a bigger problem than the threat of anarchy following from abstract rights is the erosion of the understanding that liberty and the freedom of moral choice are sacrosanct, based on our common human nature. Both in international human rights and in national jurisprudence, fundamental freedoms are being relentlessly subordinated to other goods, such as “diversity,” or freedom from emotional distress, or the absence of social conflict. In societies where social and material progress has grown from individual freedom, speech is being limited in order to protect “feelings,” in ways akin to medieval Islamic teachings. Our choices in speech and association are being “balanced” against an ever-broadening array of social goals that supposedly trump individual freedom.
• Human rights curricula in university and NGO-based programs today hardly mention the principle of natural rights. The invocation of natural law and natural rights as foundations of human rights by the Trump administration’s Commission on Unalienable Rights set off a firestorm of misguided indignation among human rights organizations. Human rights are widely regarded as essentially a matter of treaties that have come into force by the necessary number of state signatories, along with utopian soft law designating all manner of social benefits as human rights. In the circumstances, we need to dial up, not back, the insistence that estrictions of basic rights like freedom of religion, speech, and association must withstand the most rigorous constitutional tests.
• The lessons of history suggest that the human rights campaign should leave the bureaucratic international scene, with its moral equivalence, and return to domestic politics. The goals should be a policy of national liberalism, centered on defending human rights but shunning international institutions that have been corrupted by oppressive regimes Such an approach would face an ostacle in the form of the human rights campaign’s principled detachment from any partisan posture that would slant analysis and distort facts to support a political agenda. The civil society human rights campaign has sought to be independent in order retain credibility as a force for truth, removed from partisan politics. International standards and law provided universal criteria by which government policies and practices were to be measured, and members of civil society would act as agents of this poli ically neutral realm of values. Paradoxically, this leaves politics to people who are not concerned about individual freedom from state coercion. International law means little to despotic regimes, some of which continue to degrade the very idea of law i to nothing but an expression of power, and indeed acknowledge subordinating it to their ideological objectives.
• International human rights law has been conceived as a unifying moral bridge between diverse societies, and sometimes it is efective in making people understand human rights as universal. But this law is so often ignored or corrupted that its own authority has been greatly diminished. For the average citizen, holding a regime accountable to international law carries less weight than holding it accountable to moral law, a language that speaks to men’s hearts.
• Human rights analysis should be nonpolitical in the sense of cleaving to the ideal of detached objectivity, but this does not mean that political movements cannot march under the banner of human rights, as happened in revolutionary America. In many cases, such political movements need to aim for a radical overhaul of a political system, where the fundamentals of government do no give citizens the power to achieve reform. The Declaration of Independence made a general claim that “Governments are instituted among Men” to secure “certain unalienable Rights,” and so “whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government.” In a letter (1790), Thomas Jefferson expressed pride that this claim was not only for the benefit of his countrymen: “It is indeed an animating thought that, while we are securing the rights of ourselves & our posterity, we are pointing out the way to struggling nations who wish, like us, to emerge from their tyrannies.”
• The human rights campaign needs to be a national campaign for freedom, not a campaign for peace or global unity. In the international community, “conflict prevention” often lives in the same house as human rights, but human rights are not secured without conflict. Indeed, civil society faces a never-ending battle to gain and protect its liberties. The human rights campaign needs to promote political change, and in some cases regime change. It should expose abuses not as violations of disputable international human rights law, but as crimes against unconditional moral law.
• To retain clarity and integrity, government human rights policy toward other nations ought to be mainly unilateral, not subjec to the absurdity of defending human rights in harmony with regimes that are propped up by repression. It should also be tough-minded about political change. In the postwar era of institutionalized human rights universalism, cooperation with international institutions and legal procedures has resulted in very little liberalization of governments and has too often bolstered the status quo. Change toward freedom and democracy among “insecure ruling organizations” can come from what Gordon Chang called the “inspirational impact of America’s form of governance and values.” If America is true to its philosophical roots in classical liberalism, it has a unique approach to protecting universal human or natural rights, and history has shown that its particular o igins do not dimmish its universal appeal.
• I have tried to show the problems inherent to the internationalization and institutionalization of human rights. But the gover ments of free people can work together on an ad hoc basis to support the aspirations of others who seek freedom and self-determination—by speaking in uncompromising terms, by showing solidarity with human rights dissidents, and by withholding cooperation from offending regimes. The civil society campaign for human rights, which will always maintain the hope of changing the political cultures of oppressive societies, needs to relearn the largely forgotten language of natural law as the basis of human righ s. It should convey the message that human rights, so essential to moral flourishing, are not simply established by laws, but grounded in ultimate truths.
• In the preceding chapters, I presented a review of religious and political traditions, models, and assumptions that have influenced the main institutions and practices of international human rights. The cosmic universalism of classical Greece, seeking harmony with nature, morphed into the political and institutional universalism of Hellenism, the Roman Empire, and Christendom, resulting in a common belief that moral and political unification could give rise to a virtuous international order. In early modern times, natural law, as the foundation for moral unity among nations, came to be identified with the positive international law of a society of nations. Successive efforts to plan and construct a unified, rules-based international order led to the founding of the United Nations, which set forth a heterogenous amalgamation of human rights principles as an aspirational global co stitution, with the intent of bringing the laws of dissimilar nations into harmony with one law of nations whose legitimacy rests on its universal reach and its incorporation of diverse cultural values.
• The juggernaut of institutional universalism rolled over the more realistic aims of classical liberalism, in which the principles of civil society and the laws of nation-states are seen as the only practical guardians of natural rights, where respect for those rights has become rooted in a political culture of liberty and government by consent. In response to abuses of the natural right to freedom, the old liberalism promoted internal political reform from the bottom up, rather than any scheme to achieve reform and moral unity among nations through overarching institutions. Commitment to individual freedom as a universal good is joined with an appreciation of sovereignty, democracy and constitutional law as freedom’s protectors. Individuals and national communities are responsible for rational and moral self-governance; they are ultimately the ones who can secure their own rights. A clarion call for liberty everywhere can help them in the effort by affirming that all of us deserve political freedom. But today, the reason-based principles and the grasp of practical political realities that characterized the pursuit of freedom in he old liberalism have been relegated to a corner of political thought that is associated with a cold-hearted “realism” and considered hostile to the very idea of protecting human rights around the word.
• A practical realism calls for recognizing that there will never be a uniform world order of human rights. Some populations will not struggle for their liberties. Some governments that now respect liberties will slide into autocracy. As Leo Strauss commented, universality and reason will never be universally respected. While the capacity for reason is at the heart of universality and natural law, it is not evenly distributed among human beings, as the early Stoics understood. But it does connect wise men and women as well as societies that respect universality around the world. The understanding that liberal governance is what best honors universal human nature links people in diverse societies, and this shared understanding is deeper than abstract and unenforceable international human rights law.
• A grassroots movement toward liberty and democracy responds to what F. A. Hayek called a nomos, i.e. , “a universal rule of just conduct” that retains its moral integrity regardless of how it is respected in particular instances. When we support movements for liberty in other societies, we are not aiming for “constructivist rationalism,” which Hayek identified as the source of “all socialism, planning and totalitarianism.” He saw an “indirect” way to achieve harmony: a spontaneous order arising from “regularities of the behaviour of the elements which it comprises.” We do not know if members of other societies will heed the call of freedom and take action to change the governance of their societies in ways that honor universal human nature and permit harmony with other nations sharing the same principles. But with modesty and realism we can preserve the principle of freedom in o der to share it in good form and judge the behavior of regimes on a clear standard.
• Reality has caught up with the project to civilize the world through progressive compliance with international human rights law. Disparate cultures were expected to adapt themselves to global standards and soften abuses of individual rights, but cultural differences have remained an obstacle to this vision. As noted above, some elements of the project have proved worthy. We must not make the error of jettisoning the internationalization of human rights altogether because of the failure of hubristic and politicized interpretations of human rights. Instead, we must pursue liberalization by more modest yet more effective means.
• I argue here for universalist unilateralism. First, we must recognize that universal principles are best defended nationally, ut they also need to be energetically defended and projected abroad, with the goal of inspiring political change in unfree states. More can be done for human rights through principled bilateral policies than through human rights multilateralism, which engenders moral obfuscation and compromise, bureaucratic paralysis, and a preference for “stability” over political freedom.
• Human rights is “individualism writ large,” said Charles Fried, a former U.S. solicitor general. Individualism transposed onto the question of international relations is unilateralism, and it is subject to similar misunderstandings, suspicions, and accusations. Unilateralism is claimed to be intrinsically immoral, in contrast with multilateral action. The moral principle of universal human rights has been conflated with the notion of a moral obligation to promote this universal ideal through inclusive global processes. Liberal societies can productively cooperate with like-minded states to promote and defend liberty, but should avoid permanent bureaucratic formations that give transnational identity and agency to international institutions.
• International law and institutions do not confer dignity on societies. The righteous acts of individuals, inspired by reason, elief, and the institutions that cultivate them, give dignity to societies and promote human flourishing. The “international order” does not make nations virtuous or just. Rather, it is virtuous people who build societies that support realms of freedom, justice, and security around the world—realms that we are obligated to protect and help enlarge.
• Index
• Bork, Robert, 195
• A
• Bourdieu, Pierre, 95
• Bukovska, Barbora, 69
• Adams, John, 42, 53, 80, 81
• Burke, Edmund, 79, 93, 139, 178, 191, 193, 197
• Adams, Samuel, 80
• Affeldt, Steven G., 92
• Albright, Madeleine, 185
• C
• Alexander the Great, King of Macedon, 14, 21, 22, 33, 86
• Callahan, Keegan, 77
• Calvinism, 103
• American Revolution, 79, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 91, 193
• Carolingian Empire, 49
• Catholic Tradition of the Law of Nations, The, 46
• Annan, Kofi, 153, 154
• Antigone, 19, 20
• Cato Institute, 1, 190
• Aquinas, Thomas, 18, 50, 51, 59, 113, 121
• Chadwick, Henry, 39, 40, 41, 48
• Chang, Gordon, 200
• Arendt, Hannah, 138, 139, 140, 192
• Chinese Communist Party, 68, 162, 164, 173
• Aristotle, 20, 21, 22, 27, 50, 67, 95, 128
• Christ, Jesus, 7, 9, 37, 39, 40, 41, 43, 44, 45, 51, 53, 170
• Atlantic, 10, 63, 83, 99, 137, 145, 185
• Christendom, 11, 7, 8, 37, 42, 46, 47, 48, 49, 51, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 61, 62, 73, 74, 105, 119, 120, 121, 124, 128, 192, 200
• Auerbach, Erich, 42
• Aurelius, Marcus, 26, 27, 58
• Auschwitz, 183
• B
• Churchill, Sir Winston, 111, 168
• Cicero, 25, 26, 27
• Bachelet, Michelle, 162
• City of God, 43, 46
• Balcerovic, Leszek, 140
• Civil War, 81
• Baldry, H. C., 19, 21, 23, 25, 26, 29, 30
• Cohen, Hermann, 31, 32, 34, 151
• Cold War, 136, 176, 186
• Bangkok Declaration, 144
• communitas, 47
• Beneš, Eduard, 109
• Congress of Vienna, 8, 99, 100, 101, 106, 117, 119
• Berlin Wall, 135
• Berlin, Sir Isaiah, 4
• Cook, Thomas I., 75
• Bittul, 34
• Cordell Hull, 185
• Blinken, Anthony, 187-188
• Boniface VIII, Pope, 54
• Franklin, Benjamin, 83
• Council of Europe’s Parliamentary Assembly (PACE), 134, 167
• Freedom House, 2, 145, 162
• French Revolution, 8, 81, 91, 92, 99, 138, 139, 178, 197
• Creon, King, 19
• Cynicism, 13, 14, 15, 22, 24
• Fried, Charles, 203
• D
• Fromkin, David, 68, 141, 195
• Fukuyama, Francis, 187
• Dante, 55
• Dark Ages, 49
• G
• Davies, Norman, 5, 41, 42, 46, 49, 55, 56, 62, 81, 92, 105
• Gaius, 27
• Gandhi, Mahatma, 111
• De Alexandri magni fortuna aut Virtute, 21
• Garden of Eden, 33
• Gay, William, 94
• De Monarchia, 55
• General Assembly, 8, 28, 89, 100, 116, 117, 146, 147, 148, 150, 154, 155, 156, 157, 159, 160, 161, 165, 166, 174, 175, 183, 18
• Debasement of Human Rights, 6, 93, 126, 127, 128
• Dershowitz, Alan, 151
• Dewey, John, 105
• George Washington University, 187
• Dickenson, E. D., 106
• Gesinnungsethik, 80
• Diogenes, 13, 14, 15, 16, 22, 24, 80, 189
• Glendon, Mary Ann, 8, 120, 123, 126
• Gobush, Matt, 101
• Diplomat, The, 68
• Gomez, Roland, 159
• Dominus Mundi, 49
• Gramsci, Antonio, 77, 122
• Donnelly, Jack, 119, 130
• Great Schism, 49
• Dugan, Aleksandr, 145-146
• Great War, 101, 105
• Durkheim, Emile, 89, 90, 122
• Grotius, Hugo, 8, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 66, 74, 75, 110, 119
• Dutch Provinces, 81
• E
• Grygiel, Jakub, 186
• Guterres, Antonio, 94, 187
• Economic and Social Council, 117, 155
• H
• Economist, 2, 163
• Haitian Revolution, 81
• ECOSOC, 117
• Hamas, 132, 133, 151, 161, 181, 182, 183, 185, 186
• Eide, Asbjorn, 128
• Einstein, Albert, 111
• Hamilton, Alexander, 80, 86, 194
• Engels, Friedrich, 145
• Hanson, Victor Davis, 181, 182
• Enlightenment, 4, 6, 7, 34, 66, 79, 86, 90, 91, 95, 114, 123, 126
• Harris, Kamala, 133
• Hayek, F. A., 202
• Eppstein, John, 46
• Hazony, Yoram, 18, 193
• Eratosthenes, 21
• Hegel, F. G. W., 25, 104
• European Union, 39, 52, 95, 97, 102, 134, 140, 167, 182, 186
• Helsinki Accords, 9, 69, 97, 136
• Helsinki Federation for Human Rights, 9, 168
• F
• Herzberg, Anne, 182
• Federalist, The, 78
• Kirk, Russel, 93
• History of Freedom, 24
• Kirkpatrick, Jeane, 146
• History of the Peloponnesian War, 66
• Kissinger, 57, 99, 100, 101, 104
• Kommersant, 170
• Hobbes, Thomas, 7, 42, 66, 67, 68, 70, 72, 77, 79, 96, 195
• Koskenniemi, Martii, 62
• Kuzmin, Gennady, 166
• Hoff, Henning, 118
• Honneth, 98, 185
• L
• Huizinga, Johan, 10, 53, 138, 139
• Human Freedom Index, 1
• Lacroix, Justine, 178, 191, 192
• Human Rights Council, 2, 9, 129, 131, 132, 134, 136, 147, 148, 154, 155, 156, 157, 158, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163, 165, 166, 172, 181, 182
• Laertius, Diogenes, 13, 23, 24
• Lantos, Tom, 154
• Latham, Andrew, 186
• Lauterpacht, 22, 62, 110, 111, 150
• Lavrov, Sergei, 170
• I
• Law of War and Peace, The, 58, 59, 61
• International Criminal Court (ICC), 134, 149, 151, 152, 183
• League of Nations, 8, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 114, 115, 119
• International Court of Justice (ICJ), 149, 150, 151, 152
• Lenin, Vladimir, 134
• Idea of History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View, The, 96
• Leo XIII, Pope, 126
• Leviathan, 42, 66, 67, 69
• Ignatieff, Michael, 123
• Limon, Marc, 172
• Independence of Nations, The, 68, 141, 195
• Locke, John, 7, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 86, 96, 113, 195
• Integral Humanism, 121
• Loessl, 44, 46
• Is the International Legal Order Unraveling?, 186
• M
• Israel, Jonathan, 79
• Magna Carta, 71
• J
• Magna Moralia, 20
• Manent, Pierre, 17
• James, William, 15, 42, 43, 53, 59, 84, 98, 103, 127, 153, 172, 185
• Maritain, Jacques, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 127, 129, 177
• Jefferson, Thomas, 78, 79, 80, 81, 83, 84, 85, 92, 99, 102, 108, 199
• Marshall, Paul, 41, 120, 121
• Mayaan, Michal, 182
• Jinping, Xi, 132, 164, 173, 174, 175
• McCauliff, C. M. A.,124, 127
• John of Patmos, 38
• McGrogan, David, 158
• Johnson, Paul, 43, 50
• Mearsheimer, John, 186
• Judex Omnium, 49
• Medea, 19
• K
• Medieval Internationalism, 108
• Meloni, Giorgia, 95
• Kant, Immanuel, 8, 75, 91, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 107, 184, 185
• Metternich, Klemens von, 99, 100
• Mises, Ludwig von, 109, 110
• Kaplan, Seth 125, 129, 130
• Mitrany, David, 107
• Kimball, Roger, 95
• Philo, 29
• Monroe, James, 80, 84, 85
• Pickering, Timothy, 81
• Monroe Doctrine, 84, 85
• Pilon, Juliana, ix, 5, 71, 96, 147
• Montchalin, Amélie de, 167
• Plato, 19, 23, 25
• Montesquieu, Baron de, 7, 73, 76, 77, 78, 79, 81, 86, 110, 130
• Plutarch, 14, 21
• Polish Helsinki Foundation, 149
• Morgenthau, Hans, 68
• Politics, 6, 20, 21, 27, 33, 38, 68, 71, 74, 76, 77, 80, 93, 97, 98, 101, 105, 121, 123, 149, 153, 154, 178, 202
• Moses, 31, 32
• Moyn, Samuel, 19, 119
• Moynihan, Daniel Patrick, 146, 148
• Muggeridge, Malcolm, 53
• Politics Among Nations, 68
• Murray, Douglas, ix, 148
• Pompeo, Mike, 17
• N
• Portella, Mario Alexis, 61
• Posner, Eric, 51, 150
• Napoleonic Wars, 8
• Pracnchere, Jean-Yves, 191
• NATO, 10, 63, 99, 167, 170, 186
• Price, Richard, 82
• Natural Law and the Science of the State: Elements of the Philosophy of Right., 105
• Progress of International Government, The, 107
• Promised Land, 33
• Netanyahu, Benjamin, 152, 183
• Protestant Reformation, 55, 56, 90, 82, 108
• Neuer, 159, 160
• New World Order, 15, 24
• Providence, 46, 101, 123, 165, 173, 177, 195, 197
• Nicomachean Ethics, 20
• Nisbet, Robert, 82
• Pufendorf, Samuel von, 60
• Nobel Peace Prize, 185
• Putin, Vladimir, 151, 165, 166, 171
• nomos, 202
• North Atlantic Treaty Organization, 63, 99
• Q
• Quadragesimo Anno, 126, 127
• Nowicki, Marek, 149
• Nowrasteh, Alex, 189, 190
• R
• Nussbaum, 23, 30
• Rabkin, Jeremy, 74, 75, 78
• O
• Rand, 7, 71, 143
• Raz, Joseph, 141
• Oakeshott, Michael, 34
• Reflections on the Revolution in France, 93, 191
• oikeiosis, 24, 196
• Orban, Victor, 170
• Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, 97
• Origins of Totalitarianism, The, 138
• Ottoman Empire, 39
• Remler, Philip, 116, 171
• P
• Renaissance, 4, 43, 50, 55, 90
• Republic, The, 23
• Paine, Thomas, 79, 80, 81, 82, 85, 196
• Rerum Novarum, 126, 127
• Rights of Man, 22, 80, 121, 122, 139
• Parry, John, 58, 61, 110, 111
• Rights of Man and the Natural Law, The, 121
• Perpetual Peace, 95, 96, 98, 185
• Philip IV, King of Spain, 54
• Steinberg, Gerald, 182
• Roman Empire, 7, 25, 26, 27, 31, 41, 46, 49, 57, 78, 102, 128, 200
• Stiftung, Friedrich Ebert, 153, 154
• Stoa Poikile, 23
• Rommen, Heinrich, 190, 191, 193. 194
• Stoicism, 13, 20, 22, 23, 25, 27, 28, 29, 30
• Rosales, Hector, 165
• Strauss, Leo, 25, 31, 61, 66, 71, 77, 143, 201
• Rousseau, 8, 79, 91, 92, 93, 94, 178
• S
• T
• Sacks, Rabbi Jonathan, 32, 33
• Tabarrok, Alex, 145
• Santayana, George, 54
• Tacitus, 28
• Sartre, Jean Paul, 17
• Talbot, Strobe, 4
• Schaefer, Brett, 142, 157, 160, 163, 186
• Talmud, 33
• Tarcov, Nathan, 71
• Scheler, Max, 139
• Taub, Gadi, 182
• Schiller, Friedrich, 191
• Teitgen, Pierre-Henri, 168
• Scruton, Sir Roger, 192, 196
• Temple of Jerusalem, 38
• Second Treatise of Civil Government, 71
• Theodosius the Great, 41
• Thucydides, 16, 66, 195
• Security Council, United Nations, 8, 116, 117, 118, 140, 150, 170, 171, 182, 186, 187
• Timaeus, 20, 25
• Time, 4, 155, 162
• Tocqueville, Alexis de, 193
• Seidentopf, Larry, 16
• Torah, 18, 32, 33, 34
• Seneca, Lucius Annaeus, 26
• Tower of Babel, 34, 44, 97
• Sermo ad Caesariensis Ecclesia plebem, 41
• Treaty of Berlin, 100
• Treaty of Westphalia, 61, 62, 118
• Shellens, Max Salomon, 20
• Tree of Knowledge, 33
• Shils, Edward, 129, 141, 189, 190
• Troeltsch, Ernst, 42, 52
• Siedentop, Larry, 50
• Trubetskoy, Prince N. S., 169, 170, 171
• Smith, Chris, ix, 18, 156
• Snell, Bruno, 19
• Trump, President Donald, 152, 164, 198
• Social Contract, The, 92
• Social Teaching of the Christian Churches, 43, 52
• Türk, Volker, 131, 132
• Two Treatises of Government, The, 75
• Socrates, 16, 20
• Sohm, Rudolf, 42, 48, 49, 52, 53
• Somin, Ilya, 189, 190
• U
• Sophocles, 19
• Spinoza, Baruch, 42
• Universal Declaration on Human Rights (UDHR), 94, 118, 119, 120, 121, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131, 143, 144, 63, 164
• St. Augustine, 43, 44, 48
• St. Ignatius, 37
• St. Paul, 39
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 75
• State and Revolution, 134
• Wisse, Ruth, 183
• United Nations Charter, 1, 47, 97, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 123, 131, 146, 170, 173, 188
• Witte, 37, 39, 44, 50, 55, 56, 122
• World Trade Organization (WTO), 173
• United Nations General Assembly, 28, 116
• World War I, 8, 99
• World War II, 109, 111, 114, 118, 133, 185
• United Nations Human Rights Council, 35, 153
• Wright, R. F., 108
• United States Declaration of Independence, 17
• X
• Universal Periodic Review, 129, 134, 155, 160, 161, 162, 178
• Xenophon, 16, 20
• universality, 1, 3, 4, 5, 24, 25, 28, 33, 34, 49, 54, 57, 60, 73, 80, 89, 90, 91, 97, 98, 102, 106, 107, 108, 112, 142, 176
• Xu, Chen, 162
• Y
• Yunus, Mohammad, 164
• W
• Z
• Walker, Neil, 37, 124
• Zeno, 22, 23, 24, 26, 29, 30
• Washington Post, 38
• Zeus, 19, 22
• Washington, George, 80
• Zhaoxu, Ma, 163
• Weber, Max, 28, 39, 42, 46, 52, 53, 80, 119, 141, 178
• Zwart, Tom, 164
• Weiwei, Zhang, 164
• Wilkie, Wendell, 111
• Will to Believe, The, 103
• Wilson, Wilson, ix, 8, 13, 101, 102, 103, 104, 106, 107, 109, 147, 172
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