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Responsibility to Protect and The Last Utopia

Earlier this week, David Bosco interviewed Samuel Moyn, author of The Last Utopia. Moyn presents a revisionist history of the modern human rights movement, and he argues that the movement had its real origins in the relatively recent past in the 1970s. Moyn writes in the first chapter: The classic case begins with the Stoic […]

Earlier this week, David Bosco interviewed Samuel Moyn, author of The Last Utopia. Moyn presents a revisionist history of the modern human rights movement, and he argues that the movement had its real origins in the relatively recent past in the 1970s. Moyn writes in the first chapter:

The classic case begins with the Stoic thinkers of Greek and Roman philosophy and proceeds through medieval natural law and early modern natural rights, culminating in the Atlantic revolutions of America and France, with their Declaration of Independence in 1776 and Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen of 1789. These are usable pasts: the construction of precursors after the fact. The worst consequence of the myth of deep roots they provide is that they distract from the real conditions for the historical developments they claim to explain. If human rights are treated as inborn, or long in preparation, people will not confront the true reasons they have become so powerful today and examine whether those reasons are still persuasive. (p. 12)

The error that R.W. Southern called precursorism is always a temptation for historians. This is partly because it offers a way to get around the messiness of contingency, and it creates the illusion that the most significant ideas and actions of a given period were those that seem to conform to our expectations of what matters in the present. It is a way of claiming and appropriating the past for ourselves, and it is also a way of projecting our preoccupations into the past. It is also a means of defending something quite new as if it were also grounded in ancient tradition. Precursorism keeps us from understanding what Moyn calls the “real conditions” because it does not investigate deeply enough into how these developments happened. It is intriguing that Moyn likens historians of the human rights movement to church historians, because what he seems to be doing in his book is very similar to the efforts of modern historians to reconstruct doctrinal development without taking the arguments of heresiologists as the final word.

Moyn describes the modern human rights movement as an alternative, minimalist utopianism that emerged in the 1970s to replace earlier utopian schemes that were regarded as failures. He stresses one important feature of this minimalism in the interview:

Human rights came to take over our idealism in part as common denominators, but also because they were less ambitious, as well as less risky — in particular, in not courting violence in the name of liberation.

He goes on to say that this minimalism has waned as time has passed, and now the human rights movement faces the problem of adopting some of the ambitions of its defeated competitors:

Now, however, people are willing to set aside some of the very minimalism that allowed human rights to survive as its rivals failed. For example, the new doctrine of the “responsibility to protect” that is a form of human rights idealism is willing to countenance violence, albeit as a last-ditch option, as in the Libyan campaign today.

It is useful to revisit David Rieff’s article on R2P to consider whether the use of force is, in fact, a last-ditch option in practice. According to Rieff, military action was supposed to be a last resort:

Where, at least as Evans sees it (Kouchner would almost certainly disagree), humanitarian intervention was exclusively coercive, and most often militarized, the R2P is different because its fundamental emphasis is on preventive action, preferably as early as possible, and on using every possible nonmilitary means. Resorting to force is a last recourse.

The dilemma that R2P faces is that it has not replaced the “exclusively coercive” humanitarian interventionism, but simply revived it under a different name. The resort to military action is the thing in the R2P doctrine that is most likely to be used:

What Evans has never been willing to entertain is that whatever outcome he and the other architects of R2P might have wished for, its military aspect remains the most usable element of the doctrine because it is the only one that is both coherent and practicable.

The experience of the modern era is that armed doctrines eventually discredit themselves. However, the use of force in humanitarian interventions by itself isn’t going to cause people to turn against the human rights movement as a whole, and Moyn is probably right that the claims of this utopianism are still minimalist enough that it won’t suffer the same catastrophic collapse as earlier ideologies. It does make me wonder how long it will be before the backlash from human rights activists starts as it becomes increasingly clear that governments are exploiting R2P’s rhetoric to justify military interventions without meeting its criteria or adhering to any of its other requirements.

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