WORLD GOVERNMENT AND HUMAN RIGHTS
Human rights, reborn in the 1940s, a major element of our twenty-first-century versions of international activism and social hope, must be understood historically as the result of a massive historical failure to attain what was truly wanted at the end of World War II by a vast range of different commentators, but also by significant popular movements and average opinion. It was the also-ran that became a point of hope—lamed and stunted though it seemed—when the favorite was disqualified.
Many intellectuals’ primary practical hope throughout the war had been for “world government,” even among the figures we’ve already seen. Kahler had demanded a postwar “worldwide planned economy.” Norman Cousins, he of “Modern Man is Obsolete,” took it for granted as the necessity of the time. Mumford said he wanted more “world government” than the United Nations would ever be able to provide: “Today unconditional cooperation is the price of man’s survival.” Robert Maynard Hutchins, habitual organizer and founder of grand projects, launched the Committee to Form a World Constitution—in which he and others, like the Continental Congress, would actually sit down and write a single document by which to govern the globe. In a series of twelve two- or three-day meetings, “alternating between Chicago and New York,” he put together his group of well-known thinkers to write the new constitution between February and April 1947. The participants included Reinhold Niebuhr, Erich Kahler, Mortimer Adler, and Hutchins’s dean of the Humanities Division at University of Chicago, Richard McKeon (best remembered today for a standard edition of Aristotle). Niebuhr had been making gnomic statements on world community since 1944 (“the final possibility and impossibility of human life,” “mankind’s final possibility and impossibility”). He participated in Hutchins’s hubristic project and then pulled out at the last minute. (McKeon, too, ultimately refused to sign.) But Norman Cousins stepped in and published the Chicago–New York group’s completed constitution of “the Federal Republic of the World” in the Saturday Review of Literature. “[T]he age of nations must end, and the era of humanity begin,” it intoned. The movement went to France, too. Garry Davis, a twenty-six-year-old former American bomber pilot and Broadway actor, tore up his passport in Paris in May 1948 to renounce his citizenship in any nation and start a movement for world citizenship. In the publicity, demonstrations, and petitions that followed, Camus (among others) endorsed his aim.
Yet world government as a dream expired by the end of the ’40s; its closest practical realization, the United Nations, was a painful disappointment to everyone but Great Power diplomatists from its start, too much a means for existing nation-state diplomacy and too clearly and cynically dominated by the countries that made up the Security Council and retained the famous veto. (Hutchins & Co. wrote their constitution, notably, after the UN Charter.)
The more apparently impractical movement, and yet the one to survive and thrive, was the organized legal development of postwar human rights. This was also the movement that more immediately matched and reflected the intellectuals’ concerns in the crisis of man, and came into contact with them in its initial project of self-legitimation.
According to the diplomatic and legal historian Elizabeth Borgwardt, the phrase “human rights” shifted in the 1940s to acquire its present meaning in the United States:
Before the war, the phrase occasionally appeared as a somewhat disfavored variation of the older locution, “rights of man.” Human rights also sometimes served as a synonym for the narrower legal term “civil rights,” as part of interwar era controversies relating to the Bill of Rights or specialized fields, such as labor rights. By the end of the war, however, the term “human rights” was consistently serving as a caption for those so-called “fundamental freedoms” that differentiated the Allies from their totalitarian rivals. … These fundamental freedoms included a subset of traditional civil rights, such as freedom of speech and religion, to which all individuals were entitled “simply by virtue of being human.”
Human rights, in a diplomatic context, had been on the agenda of Franklin Roosevelt from very early in the 1940s as a way of globalizing and moralizing the meaning of the ’30s world crisis. Isolationist Americans wanted to see two crises as separate events: an economic recovery from the Depression at home and a Continental war across the ocean that the United States should leave alone. FDR began speaking of human rights before Pearl Harbor as a way of linking human needs on both sides of the ocean. In his Annual Message to Congress of January 1941, maneuvering against isolationist opponents of Lend-Lease and the US backing of Britain against Germany, he enunciated his “Four Freedoms.” Indeed, Roosevelt dictated the Four Freedoms himself while his speechwriters looked on. Because of Norman Rockwell’s paintings of these basic goals of FDR’s American democracy during the war, in their use to boost morale, they are often remembered as having a domestic purpose. But FDR’s significant refrain, adding to and expanding beyond familiar domestic demands, pointed relentlessly to his internationalist purpose—“everywhere in the world”:
[F]reedom of speech and expression—everywhere in the world. … [F]reedom of every person to worship God in his own way—everywhere in the world. … [F]reedom from want—which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings … everywhere in the world. …
[F]reedom from fear—which, translated into international terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments … [so] that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor—anywhere in the world.
“Freedom means the supremacy of human rights everywhere,” FDR flatly said in that speech. He kept repeating this unusual phrase “human rights”—and put it into the Atlantic Charter, which he signed with Churchill on a ship at sea. Both the Atlantic Charter and the Four Freedoms were publicized globally by the US government and the armed forces during the war. The Italian intellectual Niccolo Tucci reported that his countrymen had received the Four Freedoms dropped by Allied airplanes, and desperately believed in them. The promise of individual, inviolable rights became part of a conscious policy to win even the citizens of fascist countries to the Allies. Roosevelt put human rights into each of the documents in the public-diplomatic trail of declarations by which he broadcast the expansion of the alliance against Hitler. A scholarly observer, looking back from 1945, could rattle off the sequence: in the “ ‘Four Freedoms’ … the Atlantic Charter of August 14, 1941, and the Declaration of the United Nations of January 1, 1942, [human rights] became a part of the common covenant of the States aligned against the Axis … [in] the Teheran declaration of December 1, 1943 … the Dumbarton Oaks text of October 9, 1944, up to the Charter of the United Nations … the line of progression is clear.”
FDR died two weeks before the conference that met to develop the UN Charter. This was the United Nations Conference on International Organization, better known as the San Francisco conference, held in that city’s Opera House, though much of the diplomacy occurred in the Fairmont Hotel, where the US secretary of state and his delegation were staying. The outline for the new world organization had already been written by four powers—China, the Soviet Union, the United States, and the United Kingdom—at Dumbarton Oaks, and then reaffirmed without China’s participation at Yalta, much to the consternation of smaller countries and world government advocates. According to the human rights scholar Paul Lauren, at the start of the San Francisco conference, the “briefing book … of the U.S. delegation did not contain a single agenda item for human rights.” Boilerplate rhetoric of man, however, pervaded statements on what the new order must achieve. The new president, Harry Truman, told the conference at its opening: “We must build a new world—a far better world—one in which the eternal dignity of man is respected.”
What this could mean in practice, however, was still unclear. Beyond the power-politics delegations from the Big Four powers, San Francisco hosted three hundred delegates from forty-six nations, thousands of delegate advisers, and, according to Paul Lauren, more than two thousand print and radio journalists, including representatives from all the major US news organizations, who kept their eyes on the proceedings and criticized lapses. In one of the most unusual inclusions, the US State Department also invited forty-two nongovernmental groups to attend in an advisory capacity. Among that number were the American Jewish Committee, the League of Women Voters, the NAACP, the CIO, some more short-lived groups specifically agitating for international cooperation, and even fraternal organizations like the Rotary Club, Lions, and Kiwanis. The role of the nongovernmental organizations (NGOs, as they would later be called) was supposed to be to publicize the event for their constituencies across the country, in a sort of goodwill campaign. Instead, they have gone down in history as the pivotal and unexpected actors in the assertion of human rights for the legal structure of the emergent United Nations—and thus the bearers of the discourse of man into the practical future of the world body.
The inaugural moment of an institutional framework for modern human rights is taken to be a heated meeting on May 2, 1945, in a conference room of the Fairmont Hotel. In this encounter, a group of US NGOs and their most persistent spokesman, Joseph Proskauer, president of the American Jewish Committee, insisted to US secretary of state Edward Stettinius that human rights had to be addressed in the charter, though they had thus far been ignored. Stettinius yielded, either willingly or reluctantly—the histories disagree. It is important to address, on any account, how little the US government thought of the importance of the question. This episode is retold many times in the still semi-amateur literature on the history of human rights, with predictably many variations. Disputes center on exactly why the US State Department agreed so readily to what had seemingly not been on their agenda, and subsequently pushed the other Great Powers to support human rights proposals, often against those countries’ inclinations. The explanations encompass two major alternatives: idealism abetted by assumed triviality or publicity efforts and international propaganda. (A third is a horrified reaction to the Nazis—undoubtedly real, but it did not dictate the specifics of response.) Mark Mazower has put the question of adequate explanations most pointedly in an article in diplomatic history entitled “The Strange Triumph of Human Rights,” where, while fleshing out the true details of the diplomatic context, he notes the importance of “wartime intellectual ferment within the Anglophone world” and a “wartime thought … [in which] ‘the claims of the individual’ stretched … across the political spectrum.” He cannot himself recover their details. It would be my argument that crisis of man discourse is precisely the ferment, cutting across conventional political lines, that backgrounds human rights.
The UN Charter, in the end, was a hodgepodge. It includes many noble statements on human rights, and absurdly weak provisions for their enforcement. A Commission on Human Rights was established under the purview of the Economic and Social Council. Eventually headed by Eleanor Roosevelt, it had much greater public appeal than, perhaps, it had any significance at first within the UN organization. Human rights captured the attention of the press. It was widely, and somewhat misleadingly, believed that the commission would soon draw up an international “Bill of Rights” like the one that state ratifying conventions of clamorous Americans in 1789 had added to the US Constitution. Truman himself had as good as promised such a document in his final remarks to the San Francisco conference in June 1945.