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" I am blighted by the Foreign Office at present. Earlier today, a
creepy official, who is 'in charge' (heaven help us) of South
America, came over to brief me ahead of my trip to Chile. All crap
about Human Rights. Not one word about the UK interest; how we saw
the balance, prospects, pitfalls, opportunities in the Hemisphere."
Few politicians express themselves with the bluntness of Alan
Clark, who jotted these thoughts down in his diaries when a British
minister in the 1980s. But many think that the issue of human
rights is at best a distraction and at worst an encumbrance to the
traditional jobs of diplomacy-promoting your country's interests
and safeguarding its security.
Critics of those who want western policymakers to encourage human
rights abroad often see the debate as a modern obsession-even
aberration-that dates back to Jimmy Carter. In fact, the argument
about the place of human rights in foreign policy is rooted in old
ideas about the rights of man which took on a new lease of life
during the 18th-century Enlightenment and the French Revolution.
As Henry Kissinger writes in his book, "Diplomacy" (Simon &
Schuster, 912 pages, $17.50), "Ideological fervour propelled French
armies across Europe on behalf of universal principles of liberty,
equality and fraternity." in the aftermath of the wars,
conservative statesmen like Metternich in Austria and Castlereagh
in Britain were determined to reimpose peace and order. They
believed the Napoleonic wars were the sort of ghastliness that
happens when countries try to export "the rights of man". Order,
they argued, had to be maintained through a balance of power, in
which states did not challenge each other's legitimacy.
Thus two sides quickly emerged in the early 19th century, one
concerned with the role of the universal rights of man in the
formulation of foreign policy, the other concerned with order. The
two sides persist today. Call them liberals and realists.
Liberals in foreign policy (who may not be liberals in domestic
affairs) tend to be optimistic interventionists. They believe that
history is on the side of "human rights", and that countries like
America or Britain should be prepared to give history a shove.
Liberals make little distinction between personal and public
morality. If it is wrong for an individual to do something, then
it is also wrong for a state to do it. in 19th-century Britain, the
patron saint of such thinking was William Ewart Gladstone, the
leader of the Liberal Party. In America it was Woodrow Wilson,
president from 1912 to 1920. Though they were different in many
ways, jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan were both intellectual heirs
of Wilson's moral fervour and belief in America as guardian and
promoter of freedom.
Realists are more pessimistic about progress in human affairs and
believe that states live by different moral rules from individuals.
They see power rather than principle as the driving force of
international affairs. Avoiding unnecessary conflict is an
important aim of states-and criticising another country's human
rights is likely to lead to such conflict. in 19th-century Europe,
Bismarck, the German chancellor, and Gladstone's great rival
Disraeli were arch-realists. In 20th-century America, Teddy
Roosevelt and Richard Nixon were realist presidents; perhaps the
greatest modern practitioner-theorist of realism has been Henry
Kissinger.
The liberal-realist debate tends to throw up the same questions
repeatedly. Three in particular recur: how do you decide what is
moral in diplomacy? How do human rights fit with your other
foreign-policy aims? And is history on the side of the liberals or
the realists?
Bloodsuckers versus hypocrites
Disagree with someone on economics and you are usually simply
questioning their powers of analysis. Argue with them about human
rights and you often end up questioning their morality. In
Victorian Britain, the master of moral indignation was Gladstone.
In 1876, outraged by reported atrocities by Turks against
Christians in Bulgaria, he led a campaign for concerted European
intervention in the Balkans, complete with pamphlets and mass
rallies. "There is not a cannibal in the South Sea Islands", he
thundered, "whose indignation would not arise and overboil at the
recital of that which has been done." To Disraeli, the Conservative
prime minister of the day, Gladstone's moral posturing was
intolerable. In private, he called him "an unprincipled maniac".
In public, he said the worst Bulgarian atrocity he knew of was
Gladstone's pamphlet on the subject.
One of the main reasons why Gladstone was able to stir up public
opinion was that then, as now, voters were worried that their
country's foreign policy implicated them in the evil acts of a
foreign nation. just as modern Britons criticise their government
for selling weapons to Indonesia, which has a bloody record in East
Timor, so the Victorians asked how Britain could be allied with the
brutal Turks.
Diplomats then, as now, responded with arguments about national
interests. Disraeli's government was pursuing a pro-Turkish policy
to offset the power of Russia and to protect British imperial
interests. in a twist which seems peculiarly contemporary, the leak
of an ambassadorial telegram stirred up popular passions. The
British ambassador in Turkey was found to have argued that
Britain's interest in keeping Turkey strong was "not affected by
the question whether it was 10,000 or 20,000 people who perished."
Modern realists, bemoaning the criticism they are subjected to,
sometimes see popular pressure as a new phenomenon. But even the
cause celebre of the Bulgarian atrocities was not the first
example. Castlereagh was loathed by the radicals of his day.
Shelley wrote:
I met Murder on the way-
He had a mask like Castlereagh-
Very smooth he looked, yet grim;
Seven bloodhounds followed him:
All were fat; and well they might
Be in admirable plight,
For one by one, and two by two,
He tossed them human hearts to chew
Which from his wide cloak he drew.
Modern invective just isn't up to standard.
To many liberals, Henry Kissinger is the personification of amoral
foreign policy, rather as Castlereagh once was. But Mr Kissinger is
also one of the few diplomats to try to articulate a moral basis
for realist policies. As an academic Mr Kissinger's first book was
a sympathetic study of the efforts of Metternich and Castlereagh to
re-establish international order in post-Napoleonic Europe. When
the joined the Nixon administration, he chillingly pledged to
"purge our foreign policy of all sentimentality".
In Mr Kissinger's view, Metternich had re-established peace in
19th-century Europe on the basis of the balance of power and an
agreement by the big powers to accept each other's legitimacy.
Similar ideas infused Mr Kissinger's own attempt to reduce cold-war
tensions through detente with the Soviet Union and the reopening of
ties with China. So far as Mr Kissinger was concerned, the Soviet
military threat was a legitimate source of concern; Soviet
treatment of its dissidents less so. Mr Kissinger even persuaded
President Ford not to receive Alexander Solzhenitsyn in the white
House, lest this antagonise Soviet leaders.
Mr Kissinger has never accepted that his policies were in any sense
amoral. Rather he argued that peace and order were prerequisites
for the achievement of moral ends "because ideals could hardly
flourish under conditions of perpetual war or anarchy". In his
speeches and writings Mr Kissinger has often insisted that
considerations of human rights should indeed play a part in the
formulation of American foreign policy. As his biographer, Walter
Isaacson, notes, however, such avowals of the importance of human
rights are usually followed by sentences beginning "But".
Inevitably in a country as suffused with Wilsonian ideals as
America, Mr Kissinger became a controversial figure. Conservatives
approved of his readiness to use force to protect American
interests but disliked his compromises with the Soviet Union.
Liberals liked the idea of better relations with the Soviet Union
but were horrified by the regimes Mr Kissinger was prepared to
support (the Shah in Iran, Augusto Pinochet in Chile).
When it comes to the central dilemma of foreign policy today-policy
towards China-Mr Kissinger is again an important figure (this time
in the background). And, again, he is making the case that
constructing a working relationship with the Chinese in the
interests of maintaining a balance of power is more important than
pressing for changes in the country's human-rights policy. His
maxim concerning the Soviet Union-"not to hold detente hostage to
improvements in Moscow's treatment of its own people" -could
summarise his position on China.
At the moment America's China policy seems to be swinging in a
Kissingerian direction. Having come to office pledging to get
tough with dictators "from Baghdad to Beijing", Mr Clinton has
found getting tough with China on human rights much harder than he
had imagined. An early attempt to link China's trade privileges
with improvements in its observance of human rights was abandoned
under pressure from American businessmen. But it is not just vulgar
commerce that is leading the Clinton team to play down human
rights. The threat of military conflict with China over Taiwan has
emphasised to the Americans how high the stakes are-and caused them
to redouble their efforts to get on with the Chinese.
To realists, Mr Clinton's dilemma over China was to be expected.
It is easy, they say, to posture about human rights, much harder to
do anything. Gladstone's agitation for Balkan intervention in 1876
was no more effective than similar pleas have been in the 1990s.
which leads to the second perennial question: how does human rights
fit with other foreign-policy concerns?
Historically, attempts to put human rights at the centre of foreign
policy have often gone awry. The two American presidents who have
laid most emphasis on human rights (broadly defined) were Woodrow
Wilson and jimmy Carter. Both left office disappointed men.
Grand illusions?
When he persuaded America to enter the first world war, Wilson felt
it was not enough to argue that fighting was in America's national
interest. The war was being fought, he said, to "make the world
safe for democracy". After the war, Wilson argued for a new world
order which transcended traditional great-power politics and placed
a greater emphasis on collective security, democracy and
self-determination. Yet even Wilson's sympathetic biographer,
Arthur Link, notes that Wilson's faith in the miraculous power of
democracy sometimes led him to "illusory appraisals and quixotic
solutions".
In the end Wilson's countrymen rejected membership of the League of
Nations, which Wilson believed to be the key to a new world order.
Henry Lodge, a Senator who opposed the League, commented that
American policy should be based on human nature "as it is, not as
it ought to be". Yet though Wilson was defeated, his belief that
America should promote freedom, democracy and self-determination
has remained the dominant strand in American rhetoric and a
part-often a large part-of its foreign policy.
Human rights have rarely loomed as large as they did under jimmy
Carter. When he was elected in 1976, he pledged to put concern for
human rights back into the forefront of American foreign policy
after the heyday of Mr Kissinger's realism. Mr Carter's attempts
to distance America from some of its nastier authoritarian allies
was undermined when these regimes were replaced by rabidly
anti-American governments in Iran and Nicaragua. The Carterites
could respond with some justice that the source of much of this
anti-Americanism lay in America's previous willingness to identify
itself with repressive governments. But America's humiliation in
the Iran hostage crisis and the rise of Soviet adventurism in the
third world reinforced the impression that Mr Carter's
human-rights-centred foreign policy had merely weakened America.
The election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 appeared to signal a return
to hard-edged realism.
In practice, however, far from revealing that the pursuit of human
rights abroad was futile, Mr Reagan's presidency showed that it was
possible to have your cake and cat it-ie, you could crusade for
rights while enhancing your national power and interest. Mr Reagan
was not a realist in the Kissinger mould. He had opposed detente.
Unlike the Kissingerites, who drew a distinction between the Soviet
Union's internal and external behaviour, the Reaganites saw the two
things as closely connected. The famous phrase-"evil empire" - was
a moral one. The "Reagan doctrine" sought to roll back
Soviet-backed governments by backing "freedom-fighters" around the
world.
That the democratic credentials of the Nicaraguan Contras or the
Afghan Mujahideen were, to put it mildly, disputed made some people
suspect that the Reagan doctrine was simply old-fashioned power
politics dressed up as a crusade. Towards the end of his
presidency, however, Mr Reagan was able to show that American zeal
could be applied even to right-wing allies. in 1987, American
pressure did a lot to push authoritarian but pro-American South
Korea towards democracy. Similarly the Reagan administration was
prepared to pull the rug from underneath Ferdinand Marcos in the
Philippines, despite his impeccable anti-communist credentials.
Mr Reagan's presidency made clear that supporting freedom could
successfully be made a central tenet of American foreign policy and
that the means existed to pursue that goal. in the case of the
Reagan doctrine, those means were the support of proxy wars. In
the case of South Africa-trade sanctions, initially opposed by the
Reagan administration (but signed by the president
nonetheless)-showed that there were non-military tools for pushing
human rights abroad.
The collapse of communism in Europe in 1989 appeared at first to
release America from the moral ambiguities of the cold war.
Without a global struggle against the Soviet Union to wage, America
could be much more unequivocal in its support of human rights
around the world. No longer would it have to say of a right-wing
dictator that "He may be a sonofabitch, but he's our sonofabitch."
Francis Fukuyama, an official in the Bush administration, famously
predicted "the end of history" as nations began to converge on
liberal democracy. Both George Bush and Bill Clinton proclaimed
that spreading democracy should be a main aim of American
diplomacy.
But the West's apparent failure to make much progress in pushing
human rights in China (see chart 1) has dented some of this
confidence. Clinton administration officials now take refuge in
the notion that the spread of economic freedom in China will
eventually bring in its wake political freedom. in some respects
this is a rationalisation for inaction on human rights. But it
also fits in with a tenet of liberal thought-long resisted by the
realists-that history is on the side of human rights.
History's hidden hand
Realists tend to think that liberals are soft in the head. Mr
Kissinger recently wrote that: "The growth of democracy will
continue as America's dominant aspiration, but it is necessary to
recognise the obstacles it faces at the moment of its seeming
philosophical triumph." in his view, cultural differences around
the world, combined with the inevitable jostling among rival
centres of power, make confidence in the spread of democracy a
dangerous illusion.
For much of the past two centuries, the liberal belief in the
inevitable spread of human rights and democracy did indeed seem
like more of an act of faith than a piece of analysis. But these
days, it seems to be the realists who are curiously reluctant to
acknowledge the obvious: that democracy has made vast and
heartening progress in the past 25 years.
European dictatorships collapsed in Greece, Spain and Portugal in
the mid-1970s. Most of Latin America's dictatorships collapsed in
the 1980s. Communism fell in Eastern Europe in 1989, apartheid has
gone, and former Asian autocracies like Taiwan and South Korea have
also become more democratic. So, for all the protestations of the
realists, there does seem to be a bit of a trend here (see chart
2).
Indeed, one of the lessons of recent history may be that the
realists' preoccupation with balance-of-power politics risks
neglecting the underlying forces that move history. Many of Mr
Kissinger's decisions-such as the snubbing of Mr Solzhenitsyn-now
seem ill judged. Those who regard it as soft-headed to campaign
for the release of political prisoners might reflect that today's
prisoner can be tomorrow's president. Ask Nelson Mandela or Vaclav
Havel. in such a climate, faith in the spread of human rights and
willingness to give it a helping hand may not be a liberal
illusion-it may be realistic.
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