A World Divided

The Global Struggle for Human Rights in the Age of Nation-States

Eric D. Weitz

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780691185552
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

A global history of human rights in a world of nation-states that grant rights to some while denying them to others Once dominated by vast empires, the world is now divided into close to 200 independent countries with laws and constitutions proclaiming human rights—a transformation that suggests that nations and human rights inevitably developed together. But the reality is far more problematic, as Eric Weitz shows in this compelling global history of the fate of human rights in a world of nation-states.Through vivid histories drawn from virtually every continent, A World Divided describes how, since the eighteenth century, nationalists have struggled to establish their own states that grant human rights to some people. At the same time, they have excluded others through forced assimilation, ethnic cleansing, or even genocide. From Greek rebels, American settlers, and Brazilian abolitionists in the nineteenth century to anticolonial Africans and Zionists in the twentieth, nationalists have confronted a crucial question: Who has the "right to have rights?" A World Divided tells these stories in colorful accounts focusing on people who were at the center of events. And it shows that rights are dynamic. Proclaimed originally for propertied white men, rights were quickly demanded by others, including women, American Indians, and black slaves. A World Divided also explains the origins of many of today's crises, from the existence of more than 65 million refugees and migrants worldwide to the growth of right-wing nationalism. The book argues that only the continual advance of international human rights will move us beyond the quandary of a world divided between those who have rights and those who don't.

Chapter 1

Empires and Rulers

THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY AND BEYOND

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HOI AN is a lovely Vietnamese town, one that managed to survive, largely unscathed, the wars that ravaged the country in the twentieth century. Tourists flock to it today for its river views, old-style boats, and modern fashion shops that will turn out an expertly cut dress or suit, made of fine fabric, in twenty-four hours. In the warm weather—Vietnam is always warm—a visitor sits outside at a restaurant and watches the promenade of young and old, Vietnamese and foreigners, until late at night, the locals escaping their cramped, stuffy homes and apartments, everyone enjoying the sights of people and places.

Only remnants of Hoi An’s earlier stature survive. But in the eighteenth century, it was a thriving, cosmopolitan trading port. Dutch, Portuguese, Chinese, Japanese, Indian, and many other merchants arrived, sometimes staying for months at a time until the trade winds could take them home. They bought silk, jade, porcelain, lacquer, buffalo horn, dried fish, and herbs. In turn, the merchants from overseas sold textiles, guns and tools, lead, and sulfur.

Hoi An was emblematic of a world globalized already in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The links were commercial in nature. Goods came and went, merchants and seamen came and went, linking towns like Hoi An and the faraway Dutch entrepôt of Amsterdam, enabling both of them to flourish.

Other connections were more permanent. Since Columbus’s voyages in the 1490s, Europeans had established transoceanic empires in the Americas, Southern Africa, slowly in the Antipodes, more quickly in India. Epic population movements, on a scale unheard of in prior human history, sent Europeans around the globe to establish permanent settlements, enslaved Africans to the New World, and Chinese laborers and merchants across the expanse of Southeast Asia and the Americas. Virtually every region of the world, already diverse, became much more so, a phenomenon that created grave problems for nationalists who believed that the state should represent one, homogeneous, population.

The webs of trade, empire, and migrations (free and coerced) created pathways for the exchange of ideas and political models. European scholars, publicists, and statesmen were forced to rethink their understandings of the human and natural world as they encountered different peoples, species, and environments around the globe. Sometimes they experienced these encounters personally, taking passage on merchant ships or government-sponsored explorations—as did, for example, the great naturalists Alexander von Humboldt and Charles Darwin. Others, like the French philosopher Montesquieu, rarely set foot outside their estates or villas. They sat in their libraries and read travel literature and scientific accounts, genres that became wildly popular in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and reflected about what this wider world signified for Europeans and for the human condition generally.¹ Africans, Asians, and Middle Easterners did much the same. Confronted with Western power, products, and ideas, they reconsidered some of their own scientific, religious, and political beliefs. They did not just receive Western ideas; they developed their own syncretic reform movements that blended and adapted new models emanating from the West with their indigenous traditions. Fath ‘Ali Shah, who ruled Persia from 1797 to 1834; Mehmet Ali, the effective leader and ultimately khedive of Egypt from 1805 to 1849; and a series of Ottoman sultans beginning with Selim III in 1789—all recognized the need for reform.²

Over the course of the nineteenth century, the webs created by economic relations, imperial power, and population movements became ever tighter. But in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, no one could have predicted that the outcome of a world increasingly linked together would also be a world divided into 193 sovereign states, virtually all of them trumpeting an ideology of human rights. The idea of rights was a mere glimmer in a few areas, the British North American colonies primarily. Then came the French Revolution and the expansion of French power throughout Europe, and the numerous Latin American revolutions. By 1815, however, the revolutionary surge in Europe had been beaten back, and its Latin American counterparts deeply contested. At the fabled Vienna Congress in 1815, the Great Powers reestablished dynastic legitimacy and fought every move toward national independence and rights proclamations. Surveying the world around 1815, one could see only vast inequalities and gross hierarchies of wealth and power. Those at the lower levels lived in states of abject submission with little claim on any kind of rights, let alone the resources necessary to sustain a full life. Slavery remained an accepted form of labor and life in virtually every region of the globe, including, of course, the United States.

The conditions could not have been more hostile for the establishment of nation-states and human rights. To be sure, human rights do not require complete social equality (if that were even possible). Gross disparities in wealth and vast differences in power are characteristic also of liberal societies that profess support for human rights. But to follow the German Enlightenment philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte (mentioned in the introduction) and his twentieth-century counterpart Emmanuel Levinas, human rights do require recognition of the other as a fellow human being who, by his or her very existence and nothing more, possesses the right to have rights. Even when nation-states limited recognition to fellow nationals or racial compatriots—as we shall see in the following chapters—that kind of citizenship at least marked an advance over hierarchies of power that left most people as subjects who had few, if any, rights.

The emergence of our modern world of rights and nation-states has to be explained, rather than assumed, as so many have been wont to do, as a natural, inevitable progression of the human condition. Beneath steep hierarchies of power and rampant injustices, the glimmers of a new form of politics are evident, at least in retrospect. First, we need to see just how radical a break is our own modern world from the preceding millennia marked by empires; small, regional forms of governance; and tribes and clans—all of them built on systems of inequality and non-recognition (at least in terms of rights) of other individuals. We will, with some help from travelers, explore the world of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. We will see how these travelers reported on the societies and landscapes they witnessed and the people they observed (see map 1.1). All the while, they deepened the pathways of encounter and revealed, often unwittingly, the fractures in the old world. Both—pathways and fractures—would open the way for the global resonance of a political model developed first along the Atlantic Seaboard.

MAP 1.1 The world with travelers discussed in the text.

Hierarchies

In the early 1830s, an American, James De Kay, traveled through the Eastern Mediterranean, to Egypt, Syria, Greece, Anatolia, and many Ottoman and Greek islands. He observed a great deal, and managed to wrangle an invitation to an elaborate dinner party in Istanbul. Musicians played along as the guests sampled many courses of finely prepared foods. De Kay and his colleagues asked the musicians to perform a patriotic or national song. The musicians, apparently dumbfounded, replied through a translator that “none of this kind [of songs] are extant in Turkey.”³

That was the world of empire—no “Star-Spangled Banner” or “Marseillaise,” no national anthem of any kind. Loyalty might exist to the tsar, sultan, or emperor, but it was a personal loyalty infused with religious beliefs, not a patriotic connection with the nation shared by all citizens. Empires were (and are) by definition hierarchical. The emperor typically assumes an all-powerful, almost godly countenance. If he—or, occasionally, she—is seen at all, it is only from afar, the distance marking his unique status and separation from his subjects.

De Kay explored a great deal of Istanbul, but was not of high enough stature to be received at court. The palace and all its associated buildings, as well as the workings of the government, remained terra incognita to him—until a lucky stroke won him an invitation to an imperial ceremony.

Along with many thousands of Ottoman subjects, De Kay witnessed a coming-of-age ritual, the transfer of the young prince to his instructors. Whether the event also entailed the circumcision of the prince, as would have been typical in the Ottoman Empire, our author does not say, perhaps too discreet to mention it. In any case, De Kay depicted a ceremony that bore all the trappings of imperial power.

The sultan was seated on his throne, under a splendid pavilion, which far exceeded our ideas of oriental magnificence. The grand mufti, the chief ulemahs, and the professors of the seraglio [palace] stood on the right of the throne. On the left were arrayed all the great dignitaries of the empire; and in front were placed the general officers of the army and navy. The young prince was introduced, who, after embracing respectfully the feet of his father, took his seat on a cushion placed between the grand mufti and the sultan. After a short pause, a chapter from the Koran was read, and the grand mufti then pronounced a prayer suitable to the occasion. At every pause the children took up the responses of Ameen! which were shouted through the camp, and borne back in echo from the neighbouring hills. When the prayer was concluded, the prince arose, again embraced his father’s feet, and after asking permission gracefully made an obeisance to the assembly and withdrew.⁴

Then the troops and state officials were offered a grand meal served with much “pomp and ceremony.… A long train of splendidly attired servants bore on their heads massy [massive] silver trays, loaded with every variety of food. The viands were covered with cloths of gold and silver tissue, and the procession moved solemnly to the various pavillions, to the music of a full military band.”⁵

Here we have the display of power typical for empires around the globe, the blending of religion (the grand mufti and the ulemahs), military might (the generals), and state (the officials), all present, all honoring the greater power of the sultan, whose son offers up an act of subservience and obedience (see plate 2). Abundance and prosperity (the food) are on display as well, along with the merciful character of the sultan, whose ultimate power over life and death was revealed by his magnanimous pardon of fifteen criminals who had been condemned to death.

De Kay and his party, obviously Western, were noticed by the army commander (seraskier), who had them invited to tour the grounds of the palace and some of the buildings. But only after the sultan had retired—he could not be seen by such lowly guests. The painted columns and walls, ornamented with gold and silver; the rich and rare carpets; drapery fringed with gold; a throne made of rare woods, artfully carved and inlaid with gold and ivory, the back of which displayed a gold-sculptured sun—our American was deeply impressed, imperial splendor able to capture, in his day and ours, the swooning admiration of even the most ardent democrat.⁶

The ceremony and the tour that De Kay witnessed were expressions of imperial power. Not rights-bearing citizens but imperial subjects amassed before the emperor and other dignitaries. Religious authorities, state officials, common people—each stood in its particular place, each group subservient to the next, all up the hierarchy ultimately to the sultan.

Such systems of rank and displays of power and subservience were hardly an Ottoman specialty. In the late nineteenth century, after the United States had forced the “opening” of Japan, Western observers wrote about the country’s great natural beauty and the industry of its population. The visitors also noted Japan’s strict hierarchy and exclusiveness. They all remarked on the Japanese propensity for prostration, the complete body bow that even the highly ranked executed when in the presence of those above them. The corollary was a great reticence to take any initiative not approved by their superiors, even in the most personal...