Human
Rights In The West
And The Rest
By Samir Naim-Ahmed
11 January,
2008
Countercurrents.org
The history of humanity at
large could be viewed as a continuous, steady and accumulative process
of the realization of the humanity of the Homo sapiens. The essential
characteristic that differentiates the Homo sapiens from the rest
of the Earth’s creatures is the power of the mind. It is that
power that rendered him capable of gradually but persistently liberating
himself from want and from slavery to natural forces. It is also that
mental power which enabled him to devise ever increasing means and
methods for curbing and harnessing his environment to bring it to
fulfill his basic survival needs. In addition to that it made him
capable of creating new types of needs related to his nature as a
human being rather than just an organism. Paradoxically that same
power of mind granted him the capacity to invent means and ways of
enslaving and exploiting his fellow men and also to find pretexts
for rationalizing this exploitation.
I think that the first and principal concept in the ideology of enslavement and exploitation has been since antiquity the concept of right. Some men gave themselves the right to own and manipulate some other men. The slave owners from antiquity until the fairly recent abolition of slavery in the 19th and 20th centuries did not actually deny their slaves their rights, but they simply did not consider the concept of right to be applicable to them at all. Slaves were conceived of as merely objects or some kind of creatures:
"The definitive characteristics of slaves are as follows; their labor or services are obtained through force, their physical beings are regarded as the property of another person, their owner, and they are entirely subject to their owners will. Since early times the slaves have been largely defined as things, therefore they could among other possibilities be bought, sold, traded, given as gifts or pledged for a debt by their owner, usually without any recourse to personal or legal objection or restraint."1
Those subjected to slavery had to be dehumanized ideologically by creating and maintaining an inferior self-image within them and virtually by forcing them to live in inhumane conditions thereby hampering the development of their human potential. Slave owners were concerned about the physical fitness of their slaves as long as it contributed to their labor productivity and their resale value. They did not only pay no heed to the mental development of their slaves, but prohibited any activities that may lead to such development, for example education. Slaves were then considered non-human or at best less human.
Thus human beings were classified into two major categories: those who were considered human beings, and another group who were considered outside of the circle of humanity. The history of the human rights movement is then the history of the rights of the free and powerful who considered themselves human and denied humanity to others. The concept of right does not apply to the non-human group nor does the concept of duty. Rights and duties are inseparable concepts: they are two faces of the same coin. The slaves had obligations not duties. Rights during ancient civilizations, the Greek city-states, the Roman Empire and medieval times were conferred upon free citizens. Medieval theology held that infidels and barbarians are not entitled to humanistic considerations. Declarations of rights such as the Magna Carta in 1215 and the U.S declaration of independence in 1776 were for free citizens, not for all men.
The division of people into masters (free and human) and slaves (non-human) came to an end by the abolition of slavery as an institution and as a trade by different European countries and by the United States. It was internationally banned by the declaration of the League of Nations in 1926. However, the ideology behind it survived and flourished in the form of racism, which has been the ideology rationalizing colonialism, Nazism and all the extremist movements related to terrorism. According to racist ideology, people are divided into superhuman and subhuman. Concepts such as savages, degenerates, barbarians, primitive, backward and underdeveloped have been used to dehumanize certain categories of people in order to make the concept of human rights inapplicable to them and to grant the right of their exploitation and even their extermination to the super human categories only. Such was the rationale behind Germany’s Nazi law (2). Those laws which excluded people such as Jews, communists, disabled, Gypsies, criminals etc. from employment, education, housing, healthcare, marriages of their choice, pension entitlements, professions such as law and medicine, and places of public entertainment such as theatres and cinemas. Some of those laws even granted the authorities the right to execute some categories of people (3). It is still the same rationale behind the brutal treatment of Palestinians by Israel. The concept of right was not applicable to the Jews in Nazi Germany, just as it is not applicable at present to Palestinians in Israel. Muslim as well as Jewish religious fundamentalists do not see the concept of right as applicable to anyone different from them; they grant themselves the right even to exterminate those who are different from them.
The Europeans had considered people in Asia, Africa and Latin America during the colonialist era as inferior races or subhuman, hence the concept of self-rule and self-determination does not apply to them. While the human rights movement was developing in the west, it did not occur to them that the rest of the world’s countries had any claim to such rights. These other countries had to struggle to gain their own rights: their right for freedom. They had to struggle for recognition and equality.
There is no doubt that mankind has realized a great deal of progress by granting human rights to an ever-growing number of people as individuals and as groups. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 has been a landmark in human history. The 50th anniversary of this declaration ‘marks a milestone event in the human struggle to recognize, promote, and protect human rights and fundamental freedoms’. No doubt, humanity, since the early civilizations and during thousands of years, has moved a long way towards the realization of the humanity of mankind in general. Mankind has now the scientific and technological means by which everybody on the globe could be freed from want and need and enjoys the fulfillment of his biological and spiritual needs. Some segments of the world population are enjoying the fruit of human achievements to the utmost. They enjoy an increasing life expectancy at birth and higher standards of living including housing, medical care, higher education and entertainment, and at the same time they enjoy most of the civil and political rights stipulated by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The vast majority of the world population still lives under non-human living conditions Logically, what is badly needed is the humanization of the living conditions of the people in the south and raising their standards of living to reach even the minimum standards of living in the humanized north. Only then one can talk about the universality of human rights. Universality of human rights could not be separated from universality of minimum standards of human living conditions.
We should note that the Universal declaration of Human Rights of 1948 and the subsequent covenants are the outcome of a long history of drastic socio-economic transformations of the western societies. The industrial revolution and the development of the capitalist system created the necessary objective socio-economic and political conditions for the human rights movements and hence to the UDHR. Scientific and technological advancements led to an increasing humanization of living conditions and to a constant rise in standards of living. People became more and more aware of their rights as humans, and governments became more aware that depriving people of their rights could lead to social unrest and disorder.
The humanized living conditions in western countries have been general. Divergences between different territories and different population segments have been continuously minimized and tended to be quantitative rather than qualitative. For example rural areas became urbanized and the people living in rural 'towns' enjoy almost the same opportunities as the urban dwellers. The most impoverished segment of the population in the west live as humans. They are poor and under-privileged but they do not lack access to safe water, adequate sanitation, enough food, minimum health care, and, after all, none of them starves in a milieu of abundance. The most impoverished are dignified.
The people
in the west live under the umbrella of powerful and highly developed
states with efficient departments and organizations capable of their
protection and fulfilling their needs.
In the west one can talk about inequality or discrimination, but no
one can talk about dehumanization in the west (one-fifth of the world
population).
The majority of the population in the rest of the world (four-fifths of world population) still lives under non-human conditions and hence is forced to dehumanization in reality and in consciousness. They live in underdeveloped and deformed societies. Most of these societies are raw material producers and have not gone through the industrialization stage. They are former colonies of western countries who kept them for long as raw material producers and consumers for their industrial products. They have been deprived for long from the right to develop. After attaining their national independence they remained incorporated in the world system as dependent countries.
In this world system:
"The world is divided into the industrialized north (mostly western nations, but also Japan, Australia and South Africa), and the raw material producing, technology –deficient South (mostly the third countries of Asia, Africa, and South America; the ex-communist block countries which were formerly called the second world are also today to the third world plight, but are not officially defined as south).
The north has about one-fifth the world’s population, but accounts for nearly four-fifths of its income of the 23 trillion US Dollar globe-GDP in 1993, the share of the northern countries was over 18 trillion dollars, compared to the barely 5 trillion dollars for developing countries. The south accounts for about 70% of the world’s people, most of them poor, deprived and oppressed. To gauge the inequalities of our world, it is enough to know that the bottom 20% of the world’s population contributes to only 1.4% of the global GNP, a mere 1% share of World trade and receives a miserable .2% share of global commercial lending"
As a result of this global inequality, the vast majority of the people living in the south lack access to the simplest and most elementary necessities of human survival. About 1.3 billion persons in the south live on an income less than one $US a day. In many countries the percentage of population deprived of access to safe water and to adequate sanitation is very high. Access to adequate food, housing, proper medical care is limited to a low percentage of the population. Illiteracy rates are still high in most of these countries. Access to mass communication and information means such as newspapers, radio, and television is still limited. Cinemas, theatres and museums are almost unknown to large segments of the southern populations.
In most of the countries of the south, the state is oppressive and in many is an agent for some foreign power which offers it support and protection.
The world by the end of the 20th century is still sharply divided into the humanized minority in the west and the dehumanized majority in the rest. The debate over such issues as the universality or particularity of human rights or the priority of economic, social, and cultural rights over the civil and political rights should be kept in abeyance until the lines separating the humans and non humans have been erased and universal minimal standards of human living conditions have been attained by human beings world-wide. These minimal standards should be proportional with what human kind as a whole has achieved all over its history. It should be taken into consideration that all the people of the world contributed in some way or the other in the past and at the present to the present state of human civilization.
The assessment of degrees of improvements in the process of the humanization of both the living conditions in the south and of the western ideas about its people should be given priority over the assessment of violations of the civil and political human rights which is given now the first priority by international agencies and individual western states such as USA. People in the rest should not be considered any more as the rest, but as fellow men that are human and equal and then their human rights should be defended. One cannot assess the degree of using safety measures in driving such as seat belts and first aid kits in an area which has no cars at all. One cannot expect a hungry and badly housed person to care for voting (4). In many countries in the south the illiterate, impoverished population trade their votes for meals or for money to buy their necessities for themselves and their families or vote for those who satisfy their immediate material needs during the campaign rather than for any one who has political vision. One cannot expect from a tribal state in an underdeveloped country to adopt western norms of civil and political rights, activities and organizations and apply them while the whole society is still in a pre-capitalist state and has no class structure and power groups similar to those in developed countries of the west.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the two covenants on civil political rights and economic, social and cultural rights emphasize the rights of individuals and groups in every single country in the world and lay the responsibility of the protection of those rights on the individual states under the supervision of UN agencies. In most countries of the south, the state itself is subordinated and oppressed by international powers and international political and economic regulations .The state, for different given reasons, is denied the basic aspects of individual human rights: integrity, freedom and equality. One can safely assert that in the present world system the human rights principles are not governing the relations between countries of the world. This is true for the political and the economic relations as well. On the international scene the south is devoid of political power. If we consider the globe as one human community and attempt to examine the enforcement of the articles of the UDH on the state level, we shall find that most of them are violated by the super powers and even by the United Nations, which declared them as rights of individuals. One can easily cite hundreds of violation examples for each article of the UDH. I invite the reader to read the 30 articles one by one and replace the words: "everyone and no one" in each article by "every state and no state" and see for him- or herself to what extent the UDH is respected when applied to the relations between states in the age of globalization.
The UDH addresses member states to promote respect for human rights and to enhance their recognition and observance, both among the peoples of member states themselves and among the peoples of territories under their jurisdiction. I wonder if this respect, recognition and observance of human rights be extended to the world system and applied to all the states within its jurisdiction.
It has long been stressed that all aspects of human rights--civil, political, social, economic, and cultural--are inseparable and indivisible. There is also a strong adherence to their universality. I believe that one cannot separate or divide human rights on the local, territorial and the worldwide spheres. Human rights on the individual level could not be really observed and promoted, if it stays non-respected and unextended from the international state-to-state relationships.
I sincerely hope that the 21st century will witness a fourth stage in the evolution of the human rights history.
"T.H. Marshall distinguished three stages in this evolution, tracing the formative period in the life of each of these types of rights to a different century, and the related it to an evolving concept of citizenship. Civil rights has been the great achievement of the eighteenth century. It laid the foundation of the notion of equality of all members of society before the law. Political rights were the principal participation of the nineteenth century by allowing for increasingly broader participation in the exercise of sovereign power. Social rights were the contribution of the twentieth century, making it possible for all members of society to enjoy satisfactory conditions of life" 5
This fourth
stage should make it possible for all members of the international
human family to enjoy satisfactory conditions of life. In this stage
every country in the global system may be allowed to develop freely
and be treated as equal by other countries. The international system
(the global state) should carry the responsibilities of promoting
respect and observance of the rights of all the wider world family
members indiscriminatively. Dehumanizing conditions in any part of
the world should disappear completely. All countries of the world
should be freed from powerful state interference and enjoy global
system protection and assistance.
Footnotes:
*Immanuel Wallerstein in his Letter from the ISA president titled "The West and the Rest" used the terms the west and the rest to refer to Euro centrism in social sciences until mid 20th century presupposing that it dies out as a result of the declining position of the western world. I am using the same term here presupposing that in the domain of human rights the centrism of the west has not yet died out and to emphasize the need for an end of dividing mankind into superhuman and subhuman.
1 "Slavery,"
MicrosoftEncarta98 Encyclopedia.1993-1997 Microsoft Corporation
2 Ongoing Struggles for Human Rights. Human Rights Online. http://www.udhr.org/history/timeline.htm
3 National Coordinating Committee for HDHR. Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute.
4 Yang Changquink. Is the concept of Human Rights Universal?
5 Isbjorn Eide. Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, London, 1955. pp 26-27.
Presented at the IV Symposium of the XIV Congress of the International
Sociological Association, Montreal; July26 - August 2, 1998 By Samir
Naim-Ahmed, July 1998 Ain Shams University, Cairo, Egypt
©
Samir Naim-Ahmed
