Ideal Illusions Part 3

None of Beijing's views in fact refuted the argument that civil freedoms improve economic development or that political repression may work against development. But Beijing did suggest that such notions rested on historically dubious propositions that idealized the West's actual course of development. Chinese historians point to the brutal, centralizing, and repressive methods the Western states used to develop their wealth and power as historic examples of human rights atrocities. They see Western development less as a triumphant evolution of human rights than as a process wherein high-sounding ideals were repeatedly invoked to legitimize a long series of horrors. They accuse human rights advocates of suggesting there are now far different and more humane ways to develop, though the West never practiced them during its own rise. Their intention is not to claim that China, too, should proceed like the West, with "colonies, genocide of the natives, expansionism, exploitative trade relations," as one report characterized that history. Rather they are calling attention to a certain hypocrisy in the eagerness with which critics of China conveniently turned against the very methods the West itself had used to create the wealth, affluence, and power in which its vision of rights now flourishes.143 Chinese accounts point out the role of slavery in American development, the racism that continues to this day, and the settler culture that seized the Indian lands-hardly useful methods for dealing with China's own ethnic minorities. Noting how America's great natural wealth combined with the benefits of being free of feudalism at its founding, Beijing contends that human rights conditions are "closely a.s.sociated with how developed the country's economy is."144 If it is bogus for dictatorships to justify suppression of rights under the guise of development, these critics argued, it is just as bogus to trumpet human rights arguments from the center of the greatest concentration of wealth known to history-while manifesting amnesia about the methods used to achieve it, and often to sustain it today.

Fundamentally, then, Beijing believes the United States enjoys more rights because of its wealth, power, and history-not because of its greater virtue, empathy, or understanding of others. It argues that an individualizing of human rights pervades the Western human rights stance largely because of such affluence; that basic subsistence, national independence, economic and cultural transformation are often simply taken for granted. The United States sees itself as a "mentor," concluded one Chinese observer, when it is really just ignoring the "unique conditions that have made the democratic system in the U.S. more advanced than in many other countries."145 Of course, such considerations are not entirely alien to American observers. "We tend to overlook the fact that our social and political system was established upon probably the richest, most productive, most desirable piece of real estate in the world," Senator J. William Fulbright cautioned. "If our system had been implanted on the bleak areas of Siberia, I doubt it would have been so productive."146 But such comments have been few and far between in Western human rights discussions.

In this context, Beijing asks, is it not a form of human rights violation for a nation that const.i.tutes 5 percent of the world's population to consume 30 percent of the world's oil, gas, and coal? If China, with a population of 1.2 billion, consumed what the United States does, "it would have surpa.s.sed the world's total consumption figure by 140%."147 Beijing notes as well that Americans were spared the threat of foreign invasion (though Native Americans were not) for hundreds of years, while China, like many other countries, suffered the "humiliation of being carved up by foreign aggressors and has experienced the tribulations of long-time wars." Western powers, including the United States, came heavily armed with literal as well as religious and ideological weapons, justifying the unequal treatment they imposed with the most uplifting and self-righteous words. American human rights leaders like to emphasize that the UN has been committed from its birth to human rights over sovereignty; China prefers to note that the UN has always been committed to both rights and sovereignty, for reasons any former colonized or semicolonized people can appreciate.

Are the Chinese and American human rights visions simply too far apart? Perhaps. Yet-for argument's sake-what if each side accepted the plausibility of the other's perspective and then used it to rethink human rights globally and at home? What if human rights challenged every society equally (as any system of justice really should in the end), if in different ways? For Beijing, it is America's power, not its rights-based ethos, that continues to play the central role in upholding a violent, ugly, and irrational world economic and political order.148 For Washington-and not only Washington-the Chinese government is not democratically restrained; its repressive mechanisms are potent and effective. Neither view is invalid. That Beijing feels itself under a.s.sault by Washington and Western human rights groups does not make their charges false-just truths in the service of power, which is what propaganda is so very often about.

BEIJING'S VIEW OF HUMAN RIGHTS IN THE UNITED STATES On human rights issues, Beijing has essentially refused to set itself up as a judge of others-with one exception. Though China is a developing country, it "can still afford to buy a mirror to give to the U.S. so that they can get a good look at themselves,"149 remarked one Chinese amba.s.sador. So in the 1990s Beijing began issuing detailed and wide-ranging reports on life in America, a kind of "t.i.t for tat," as Zhao Qizheng, the minister of information, put it.150 What it found amiss would startle few observers of American conditions: a steady rise in homelessness and below-the-poverty-line populations; grossly unequal access to health insurance and medical care; racial disparities in wealth and education; rampant violence reinforced by some 235 million guns; illegal detention and systems of surveillance; continued inequality of women, domestic violence, and s.e.xual offenses. The list is long and extremely well doc.u.mented.

Chinese critics asked how the growing inequalities between rich and poor in the United States could be compatible with a human rights spirit. Why were 36.5 million Americans living in poverty in 2006? Why is the wealth of the richest growing exponentially, widening the already huge earnings gap between the rich and the less well off? Why did payments to corporate CEOs that were some 475 times higher than those to ordinary workers go unchallenged by human rights advocates? On another subject, was the control of patents on medicines for AIDS and other diseases that would help enormously in poorer countries an intellectual property right-or a human rights violation?151 America's harsh penal system attracted special attention. Why, the Chinese asked, did the United States have the largest prison population in the world, nearly 2.26 million men and women in prison in 2006-counting those on probation and parole, some 7 million, one in every thirty-two adults? Why did the number of prisoners increase 7.3 percent annually throughout the 1990s, more than doubling the 1985 total? Why did blacks, who comprise only 12.1 percent of the population, comprise 40 percent of all inmates sentenced to more than one year?152 What accounted for overcrowded prison conditions, the high percentage of the mentally ill behind bars, rampant AIDS, and the s.e.xual victimization of prisoners? Why did the federal government allow states to use attack dogs in dealing with prisoners? And why, especially, when the American media cover these issues, do they virtually never do so under the rubric of "human rights," when their coverage of China's prison and labor camp conditions is always so categorized? Why, if the plight of a Chinese prisoner can "epitomize the state of human rights in China today,"153 in the words of the Lawyers' Committee for Human Rights does no American prisoner evidently epitomize the state of human rights in the United States? Why do Western human rights groups argue that, while the United States certainly needs "reform," Beijing needs "regime change" and "the rule of law"?

When the subject shifts to the second current of human rights, the differing orientations of the United States and China come through even more starkly. Although Amartya Sen is often quoted in human rights literature pointing out that, unlike China in the 1950s, no country with a free press has suffered a famine (India being his most famous example), the Chinese question the deductions he draws from this observation. And they are not alone-critics in America and abroad have pointed out that the issues of justice and a free press are not so simple. As far back as the 1850s, Frederick Dougla.s.s, looking at the unquestionably vibrant press in the United States, asked how it could coexist with one of the most cruel systems of slavery the world had ever known. Why was a people so moral about some issues able to live face-to-face with such evil? And why did segregation last for another century after slavery? The issue was not the absence of a free press or of the free flow of ideas or of criticism. How and why blatant injustices are accepted and lived with as part of the commonweal is, as the American abolitionist John Brown warned, the key question of human rights.

While American human rights groups call for democratization in other countries, Chinese critics focus on the electoral process, a "game for the rich people where politics are so highly commercialized."154 How are the $3 billion cost of presidential campaigns, the marketing of candidates, negative campaigning, and the influence of "soft" donations any different from the abuses Washington and human rights leaders are so fond of pointing out elsewhere? Are the concentration of ownership in the media and the advertising, sound-bite ethos of contemporary American democracy irrelevant to its functioning? Does it not matter that reporters, who once saw themselves as paragons of independence, "maintain their jobs, salaries, and promotion opportunities by catering to the value and viewpoints on 'international and political affairs' of the wealthy and powerful in American life?"155 In short, do human rights advocates holding up the United States as a rights-based society actually find a thriving, vital democratic ethos functioning there?

Chinese a.n.a.lysts note the absence of the word "equality" in the Const.i.tution as it came from the hands of the Founders. Even the Bill of Rights does not venture beyond civil and political rights. The Const.i.tution itself does "not include economic, social, and cultural rights."156 It includes no mandate to "have the basic needs of people satisfied." To these commentators, the preoccupation with individual rights mitigates against equality, weakens a sense of the common good, and furthers an individualism rooted in a spirit of compet.i.tion over a spirit of cooperation. American historians, of course, are not unaware of this absence. "We have yet to read a substantive meaning of equal protection into the realm of economy," noted Henry Steele Commager in the early 1990s. "Neither the court nor the Congress is at this stage prepared to say the equal protection of the laws means an equal right to a job, means equality in housing, means equality in medical care, means equality in prison and penal conditions, means equality in all those nonpolitical, non-legal, and we might say, nonsocial areas. Thus a century after we got rid of the paradox of freedom and slavery, the paradox of equality and individualism persists and may indeed be getting more aggravated."157 THE FUTURE.

In 2004, China amended its const.i.tution to include this declaration: "The state respects and safeguards human rights." The invocation of the phrase "human rights" represented the end point of a shift that had taken several decades to accomplish. The concept had been ideologically suspect as bourgeois, and it was strongly denounced in the Cultural Revolution. Then in 1985 Deng Xiaoping raised the question: "What are human rights? Above all, how many people are they meant for?" He cautioned that "we see the question from a different point of view" than the West, but he left open the answers to his questions, thus legitimizing discussion in elite circles.158 After Tiananmen, while adopting a hard line to defend the repression of popular movements, Deng supported efforts to explore the issues of human rights from a "socialist perspective." On November 1, 1991, the State Council of Information issued a white paper, "Human Rights in China"-the first human rights doc.u.ment ever released by the Chinese government. "If the name is correct," remarked one Chinese official, "speech will be heeded; if the speech is heeded, something will come of it."159 The language of human rights in China was emerging from quite different const.i.tuencies. The "lawless years" of the Cultural Revolution-during which many members of the Communist elite had also suffered acutely-provided a genuine incentive to respect the "rule of law." There is an element of orderliness in rights-an aspect of nonviolence, a reformist quality. Invoking rights in postCultural Revolution China was a "radical" step, but Chinese leaders are also showing that human rights can cut various ways, and not simply as propaganda.

Some Chinese writers see the evolution of human rights as a work in progress that only began with the individualistic visions of the American Declaration of Independence and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man. But these early liberating statements failed to restrain European colonialism and racism in the non-white world or rampant inequality at home. Only with non-Western struggles against colonialism, racism, imperialism, and economic exploitation did the concept of human rights move beyond individual rights toward the UN covenants that today codify cultural and social rights and especially the right to a decent standard of living. But this, Beijing insisted, was not where progress should stop. Additional human rights standards needed to evolve, the collective aspect of human rights to more fully develop, the social obligations of individuals to be more carefully considered, and the use of civil and political rights as a perennial prism for economic, social, and cultural rights to be divested of its ideological aspects.160 This view highlights the traditions of revolution and struggle. Its heroes include Toussaint L'Ouverture leading the uprising against the French in Haiti in the name of the rights of man; the forces of the Mahdi uprising rebelling against General Gordon in Sudan in the name of universal equality before Allah; Simon Bolivar leading the struggle for independence in Latin America; the Taiping movement seeking a more equitable society in nineteenth-century China; Mustafa Kemal enacting radical reforms in Turkey; Gandhi leading the struggle for independence and dignity in India; Augusto Sandino rising up against U.S. domination in Nicaragua.161 Contrast this list with the ones that are the norm in Western human rights histories: John Locke, Thomas Jefferson, Eleanor Roosevelt-remarkable thinkers or leaders all, and very much part of a world of law, courts, charters, and covenants. The divide between the traditions is what gives pause, a divide that underlines, once again, the differences between the two currents of human rights.

In China today the contractual contentiousness of individual rights finds less intellectual traction where collective rights challenge the idea of the isolated individual and reflect the deep anxiety that an antagonistic, self-interested struggle among individuals is far from the best way to meet human needs. Nor is there a strong belief there that "human rights" really reflect a genuine transformation in the brutal workings of the world order that has evolved out of centuries of Western power. To merely expand the human rights currently defined by the Western world would be to keep rights far too insulated from true universalism-locked into a Western provincialism that has found so much so universal so quickly because highly selective aspects of rights are already embodied in its own familiar ways.

Measured against the standards of the past three hundred years, Chinese citizens now enjoy an unprecedented degree of economic and personal freedom. Inequality is still staggering, progress uneven, the challenges enormous; but the monumental effort to change China continues from within, even if it does not fit easily into the Western human rights vision of change. Neither the national security establishment nor the human rights community has shown much sense of the Chinese people struggling to better their own society in their own way and within their own particular historical context. They seldom acknowledge that this struggle might be growing out of long traditions of protest in a culturally sophisticated society that has been undergoing continual transformation for well over a century. But what a multipolar planet without a proselytizing center might mean for China and elsewhere is not necessarily a weakening of the quest for justice but rather a vision of human rights more challenging and less comfortable for all the great powers. As well it should be.

5.

POST-REAGAN: HUMANITARIANISM AMID THE RUINS.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, Washington faced a tough new ideological challenge. The old enemy was gone. "The operative problem of the moment is that a bunch of smart people haven't been able to come up with a new slogan, and saying that there aren't any good slogans isn't a slogan either," Bill Clinton lamented. "We can Latinize and a.n.a.lyze all we want, but until people can say it in a few words we're sunk."1 "Globalization and human rights" didn't quite do it. Neither did "a strategy of enlargement ... of the world's free community of market democracies."2 Still, potentially useful new code words and catch phrases were emerging-"failed states," "rogue states," "chaos," "terrorist," "genocide." Anthony Lake, Clinton's national security advisor, observed that "ancient cauldrons of animosity" were being released-ethnic barbarism, virulent nationalism, terrorism, factional and religious hatreds-the dark underside of globalization. As the world was becoming "more connected, it had become more hazardous," the authors of a USAID doc.u.ment noted.3 "Weapons, germs, drugs, envy, and hate cross borders at accelerating rates."4 Lake was pithier: "Look around you. Listen. You can hear the locusts munching."5 Rights advocates by and large agreed, talking once again about a "disaster ridden" South in a way non-Western countries disputed and often deeply resented. Amnesty, sounding little different from Washington, warned that "a spate of local wars, often accompanied by the virtual disintegration of state authorities, have spread turmoil and terror.... Nationalist, ethnic, and religious conflict, famine and repression have led to ma.s.sive movements of refugees.... These horrific events illuminate the interdependence and indivisibility of human rights more powerfully than any abstract argument."6 U.S. human rights leaders spoke out against "isolationism" and American withdrawal as fervently as national security managers had been doing since 1945. In a world so threatened by violence and suffering, how could we pull back? The answer, if one was a moral being, appeared to be that one could not.

Yet the absence of a clear enemy laid all the more bare the real ideological impetus of American policy as almost all forms of intervention-"humanitarian" measures against atrocities and genocide, "democratization," economic "shock treatment," rebuilding of "failed states," promotion of "regime change"-became sanctioned in Washington. With the Soviet Union and the threat of its responses gone, "intervening almost anywhere" was safer, a Rand Corporation report noted with relief, "because there is no danger of escalation to apocalyptic levels."7 Despite general optimism over American preeminence, a few of the old-time national security managers were growing uneasy, sensing increasing problems in the operations of the global order itself. Among them was Zbigniew Brzezinski, who saw dangers lurking in the perception of America around the globe and the great disparities in the world's wealth. "Procedural freedom, without substantive freedom from basic wants, may not be enough," he cautioned in 1993; "the cultural hedonism of the West may appear to be less proof of the inherent superiority of the free market and more the consequence of wider global inequality."8 Expressing sentiments largely missing from human rights literature, he warned that America's internal social and cultural dilemmas were generating a twofold danger to Washington's power: "on the one hand, the image of a society guided largely by cornucopian aspirations devoid of deeper human qualities tends to undermine the global appeal of the American social model, especially as the symbol of freedom; on the other hand, that image tends to generate highly exaggerated material expectations among the vast ma.s.ses of the world's poorer majority, expectations that cannot conceivably be satisfied yet the frustration of which is bound to intensify their resentment of global inequality."9 Ten years on, Brzezinski would speak of what seemed to be a rising countercreed among desperate and dispossessed populations, "a combination of the widespread revulsion against globalization as a self-interested process of the relatively few rich to disempower the poor along with an intensified anti-Americanism which views the US as not only the motor of that unfair globalization but also as the source of political and cultural imperialism."10 America's national security managers were well aware of the dark side of globalization. Some managers liked to argue, at least in public, that a rising tide lifts all boats. Others recognized the wreckage that would inevitably be left behind as some boats sailed briskly out to sea.11 "Global elites thrive," a CIA-sponsored study pointed out, "but the majority of the world's population fails to benefit from globalization."12 "Sharpening inequalities in income"13 and "sharpening internal social cleavages" would further intensify widespread rage, elevating "the problem of inequality into the central issue of our times."14 Globalization might well tear some nations asunder, particularly given the "more than 2,000 ethnic and indigenous groups, which are minorities in the states in which they live." Or to put it bluntly, "increased communal tensions, political instability, even conflict" were inseparable from the glittering promises of globalization.15 Yet Washington's managers were not too worried. They judged that "the widening income and regional disputes" would not be "incompatible with a growing middle cla.s.s and increasing overall wealth," a situation not inimical to American power.16 If their guardedly argued economic predictions held true, CIA-funded task forces foresaw a planet of 2 billion somewhat-well-off people-enough to sustain the globalization process-living amid 4.7 billion others.

If globalization was augmenting inequality, then it was all the more critical to counter "the conflation of globalization with US values," that, the CIA observed, had "fueled anti-Americanism in some parts of the world."17 Separating out Americanization from globalization in Washington's message to the world was imperative. The chosen means was to promote the image of a transnational middle-cla.s.s world of shared universal values and civilized interests rather than an America-centered one, all the while proclaiming the nation's desire to promote human rights, to do good, to do more, to confront the suffering, and even, if necessary for humanitarian reasons, to wage war.

THE CYNICISM OF THE TRUE BELIEVERS.

The national security establishment spends an enormous amount of time researching and evaluating a vast number of issues, occasionally with great insight, but all too often with shockingly little. U.S. government doc.u.ments of the fifty years preceding the Clinton era reveal a near unceasing stream of simplifications, debate-limiting abstractions, and sweeping generalizations about American credibility and its "global role." And true to form, human rights advocates repeatedly point out that Washington is "misperceiving" the world and that if only Washington understood its true interests it would consistently promote human rights. Other critics join in arguing that U.S. intelligence fails to provide a.n.a.lyses of the world "as it is," as though the CIA had not been from its origins an agency designed to a.n.a.lyze the world from the perspective of American state interests, and to a.s.sess how to further those interests by covert and a.n.a.lytic means.

After a half century of critics' and historians' listing innumerable misperceptions and mistakes, some pause might seem to be in order to consider who is misperceiving what-and whose interests these "mistakes" serve. Nowhere is this dynamic more illuminating than in the triumph of the national security managers' ideology of interventionism, a faith in an America-centered globalism so intense, so omnipresent, and imbued with such near messianic conviction that human rights leaders widely accepted it provided that human rights were included. There is little sense that the vision of an American-centered order might itself be the source of a profound misperception of the world.

When a noted human rights advocate argues that "the biggest flaw in the U.S. approach" to foreign policy is not its "unilateralism" but its "a la cartism," she is really paying a backhanded compliment to the managers' often cynical realpolitik.18 The incessant complaints that Washington was never doing enough in support of rights, never working consistently around the planet, never using its power sufficiently for good causes, were all well and good ideologically. Yet by the onset of the Clinton years, the calls for doing more, intervening more, helping others to transform themselves in ways that American human rights leaders believed possible and just, joined them to national security leaders like Siamese twins-their movements connected more to each other than to local nationalisms or to struggles for a more multipolar, culturally diverse world.

Operationally this interventionist ethos often appears ineffective or myopic. Reform efforts never quite succeed; shock treatments in Russia and elsewhere leave staggering gaps between rich and poor, living standards decline, corruption spreads. World Bank, IMF, State Department, NSC, and human rights memoranda and reports find breakdowns, chaos, lack of progress-and then insist upon doing more, far more, of basically the same thing. Challenges and crises, then, demand not that the ethos of interventionism be changed but that it be continually refined, updated, and propagated precisely because its operationalized form is often in flagrant contradiction with its own globalist faith. Failures, in other words, end up revitalizing the faith: they have to be explained away, and then they demand renewed, ever greater efforts.

The process in which defeat becomes a reason to redouble the application of more of the same also pervaded U.S. policy surrounding "failed states." Officials occasionally acknowledge that there are really no models for nation building, that the link between economic and political development is murky, that all sorts of compromises with the real world are necessary. "Nation building is at best an imperfect concept," concedes one CIA-supported study, echoing decades of similar laments.19 "The accepted international practices to promote democracy ... haven't proved to be all that satisfactory," warned the head of the very office that oversees transitions in failed states. "The simple fact is that we do not know how to do democracy building."20 In 1994, the CIA set up a State Failure Task Force; it was followed by a Failed States Index, an intricate series of a.s.sessments that ranked states and the signals of their possible "failure."21 The dire predictions and calls for "preventive" diplomacy heralded later calls for "preventive intervention." When early studies suggested that the number of failed states was relatively modest, new criteria promptly allowed for the inclusion of "revolutionary wars, ethnic wars, adverse or disruptive regime transitions, and genocides or policides-of varying magnitudes." Such an expansive definition soon encompa.s.sed some 113 "failures" and a terminological new world to match-"fragile countries," "failing countries," "failed countries," "recovering states," "humanitarian countries," and so on.22 Washington continues undaunted by complaints from its human rights critics. They warn (again) that its actions are lowering American prestige, or (again) causing us to lose the "war of ideas," or (again) leading to a serious weakening of our "credibility," or (again) ignoring human rights ideals at the cost of embarra.s.singly blatant hypocrisy. Variants of such rhetoric plied almost daily for more than six decades are not, however, empty verbiage. They really amount to an impa.s.sioned call not to challenge or rethink global a.s.sumptions. Through the various policy fiascos of one sort or another runs a common thread: the need to a.s.sert, reaffirm, or consolidate American globalism. The vision pushes toward involvement, deeper commitment, rarely toward pulling back. Failures simply demand that we "learn the lessons"-of how to do more, better, extending our helping hand once again.

Concluding that the ideological message is not quite getting across is crucial to the way the process works. "The higher priority now accorded to nation-building has yet to be matched by a comprehensive policy or inst.i.tutional capacity within the U.S. government," concludes a 2005 report from a committee headed by Samuel Berger and Brent Scowcroft23-after more than forty years of nation-building efforts by the national security establishment. This is simply par for the ideological course. For such reports, studies, and appeals are really always in part about the need for continued ideological mobilization to undertake these tasks, however discordant the results and however obvious the failures.

Even a cursory historical look at the way the United States has "employed strategies for moving countries along the path of development" might suggest some caution as to the results.24 Yet however great the failures, the opposite conclusions are drawn. Washington's tool kits are ready at hand to go to work, and operational failures are again interpreted as reason for deeper and deeper involvement in the internal dynamics of other countries. This is no longer about the Cold War, where Washington's nation-building initiatives could be held up as a bulwark against Communism. It is about the promotion of an architecture of power that allows Washington greater lat.i.tude to pursue its own interests-promoting structural readjustment programs, pushing privatization and its attendant cutbacks in public programs of health, food, education-all the while espousing a vision of American "humanitarianism," a "rights based developmentalism," and supporting the far less well funded efforts of humanitarian, human rights, and developmental groups to help fill in where they can.

HUMANITARIANISM AS A FIGHTING FAITH.

"We feel your pain" was Clintonism not only at home. It was a call to mobilize around a politics of suffering and victimization, prompting the transformation of a humanitarian ethos into a fighting faith. Those who struggled against Communism had been able to identify a clear enemy behind much of the carnage in the world. Now at the end of the Cold War accounts of social injustice, poverty, and economic failure threatened to swamp Washington's progressive globalism.25 Humanitarianism became the postCold War zeitgeist in part because it offered a response to the atrocities and "messiness" that the Cold War no longer explained. The Cold War had projected superpower conflicts into the remotest areas of the world, but it affirmed, at least outwardly, state sovereignty. Humanitarian interventionism, by contrast, was to blossom amid withering attacks on state sovereignty as it sought to root a penetrative dynamic of globalization in a rights-based, corporate-driven development process. The Cold War had condensed all the disruptive forces of an era into Communism and its support of nationalist and radical movements. It was an age of national self-determination, revolution, and anticolonial struggles. The new era was one of democratization, human rights, and humanitarianism. In the former era Washington organized half the planet; in the latter it sought to organize the whole.

For human rights leaders this development was more an opportunity than a problem. A "responsibility to protect," the construction of a legal apparatus to try those guilty of genocide and war crimes of all kinds, and the promotion of humanitarian intervention to stop other atrocities all came together by the end of the decade. With no ideological alternatives at hand to rival an American-backed global economic order, and with local states weakened, rights advocates called for a vast new effort to infuse Clinton's "democratic moment" with a more expansive vision of human rights. In the process, human rights became "one of the world's dominant ideologies"26 and the movement itself more inclusive, developing, in the words of one Human Rights Watch official, into "a substantial mosaic that includes large professional NGOs as well as thousands of regional, national, and local organizations working on issues ranging from self-determination to the rights of children, and from access to HIV medications to the right to water."27 Human rights, the theory went, are "universal"-they are what Americans embody and others have fought for. As Clinton put it, "There is no them; there is only us."28 Making others into what they really wanted to become meant emanc.i.p.ation, not manipulation. Democratic forms might vary; the operations of the market economy might manifest themselves differently depending on levels of development. But rights were set forth in international law and shone with the clarity of law itself. No Cold Warrior ever envisioned fashioning such a penetrating ethos.

To the calls for democratization of earlier years was now added an even more morally imperative cry-the responsibility to protect the rights of others, wherever they might be, even if that meant waging war, and by so doing infusing human rights into traditional humanitarianism. Human rights organizations often speak of their efforts to defeat the claims of state sovereignty in order to defend a population from atrocities. They point to the brutal dictatorships that have invoked sovereignty to protect themselves and repress their subjects. They speak of rights trumping sovereignty, and of the urgent need to become more deeply involved in what were once sacrosanct internal affairs. They embrace the language of globalization while warning, as well, of the dark underside that demands redress through human rights. And in the process they find almost no area of any nation's internal concerns off limits to them. As Mark Twain might have put it, they may have derived from their experience of several decades of human rights struggles far more wisdom than was in them.

An expanding human rights mandate went hand in hand with the decline of Third World developmentalism. With states less and less able to deal with local socioeconomic issues, human rights leaders spoke more and more about "rights based developmental strategies." The Clinton years saw a growing convergence of those groups that promoted economic and social development with those that defended human rights.29 This was a significant step beyond Reagan's vision of democratization, in which democracy and the marketplace reinforced each other and U.S. involvement focused largely on local political, business, and security questions. Just as Washington had coupled its earlier interventions with efforts to change societies by restructuring their economies, now human rights organizations rapidly extended rights into almost all areas of development and social change. Formerly they had focused largely on civil and political issues such as torture, political imprisonment, and the rights of noncombatants; now they were addressing underlying social and economic problems.30 Nonstate violence opened up yet more arenas for action.31 Women's rights, tribal rights, gay rights, civil rights of all kinds would be advanced with the "building blocks of a rights respecting society-a free press, an independent judiciary, education in human rights, and tolerance and civilian control of the military." Human rights leaders argued for a decisive shift "from needs-based, welfare and humanitarian approaches to a rights-based approach to development."32 Amnesty embraced this holistic vision of rights more slowly than Human Rights Watch, but in August 2001 the organization voted to "adopt a new mission, which included all the rights" in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,33 joining the emerging Washington-backed consensus. Amnesty officials also spoke of overcoming the artificial divide between civil and political rights on the one hand and economic and social ones on the other; there was no justification, they said, for prioritizing either set."34 And yet, with Amnesty as with Human Rights Watch, the first current quietly rea.s.serted itself, much as Washington knew it would, because by insisting that, in the end, all the rights embodied in the first current had to be recognized in order to realize those embodied in the second current, the first remained the prism for viewing the second.

THE VICTIM.

In the 1950s, Albert Camus sought to appeal to the best in his time by writing The Rebel. The t.i.tle in the 1990s could have been The Victim. No word better captures the spirit of the age in the United States. Human rights had become the very "language of the victim and the dispossessed,"35 commented one historian. "It harvests the hopes of the victims,"36 added another. The issue of financial compensation for crime victims had briefly emerged in American courts in the 1960s and early 1970s but quickly faded. More and more, victims' rights came to mean the opportunity to speak out in court, a privilege compatible both with the goals of hard-line prosecutors and judges seeking more stringent punishments and those of progressives seeking to protect people in need.37 Both sides singled out the individual who has been wronged: the rape victim, the pedestrian hit by a drunk driver, the old couple robbed of their life savings, the bystander shot during a holdup. Who could be anti-victim?

The imagery was of harm individualized, atrocity narrated through the biographies of the innocent, accompanied by demands for remedies, empathy, a helping hand. As Canadian Michael Ignatieff astutely observed, this att.i.tude was "a weary world away from the internationalism of the 1960s," when political causes could be supported or opposed on the basis of struggles over different ways to develop societies. Now there were "no good causes left-only victims of bad causes."38 The sentiment "I'm at one with the victims," another writer noted, conceals a humanitarian anti-politics-"a pure defense of the innocent and the powerless against power, a pure defense of the individual amidst immense and potentially cruel or despotic machineries of culture, state, war, ethnic conflict, tribalism, patriarchy, and other mobilizations or instantiations of collective power against individuals."39 Political movements and ma.s.s struggles had all become tainted. Supporting victims, by contrast, was beyond causes, beyond politics.

The humanitarian spirit calls for us to be our brother's keeper; failing to come to the aid of those in need makes us complicit in their harm. One may not be directly responsible for what is happening in the world; America may not be responsible for much of the ugliness and chaos in the world. The real complicity, from the humanitarian perspective, lies in not responding. This perspective reinforced the efforts of human rights groups to move away from an exclusive focus on state action (torture, disappearance, political imprisonment) to include, as one report put it, "the culpability of state inaction in the face of known abuses by private actors."40 But what of situations that call on us to aid the "victims" by rebelling, as Camus once wrote, against what we have become? That the new humanitarian interventionism called for no transformative changes in the United States was an ideological gift to Washington. It demanded great changes of others, but of us only that we become the well-intentioned humanitarians we really were all along. It made Americans look everywhere except-fundamentally-at ourselves.

HUMANITARIANISM AND INTERVENTION.

"Human rights and humanitarianism are two sides of the same coin," Washington now argued.41 No longer was it enough to deal individually with the wars, failed states, and atrocities of Africa and the South; there had to be strategies for the long run: disaster requires development, development is the answer to disaster, government studies declared.42 In addition to addressing immediate needs, developmental relief also had to "contribute to sustainable development and peace."43 Development and human rights could no longer be isolated from this "broader context" or from a creative use of "market forces" and multinational corporations. Human rights thus became a far more a.s.sertive ethos: an anti-state centric "nation building" committed to linking up markets, elites, and NGOs on a globe-spanning scale.

In this new world, traditional humanitarian aid was too limited; it reached too few of the war-affected populations, often reinforcing an oppressive ruling elite or a local warlord. The goal for Washington was not to intervene less, USAID said, but for the state to use as many other groups as possible to do more: "The changing face of development, combined with shrinking budgets, has shaped a need for greater collaboration among government, business, and civil society."44 This change "necessitates a new kind of collaboration-one that enables the public and private sectors to transcend the traditional boundaries that have hindered cooperation in the past and to work together towards common goals."45 The decentralized world of NGOs made it all the more necessary to promote a common lexicon ideologically suited to Washington's objectives. Victims became "rights holders," humanitarians their advocates. Developmental strategies and humanitarianism were to be "people-centered," "empowering." Out was impartial, needs-based emergency relief that respected state sovereignty; in were both aid predicated on clear legal, political, and moral judgments against abusers and rights-based development.

For far too long, USAID complained, traditional aid efforts had been a subst.i.tute for "more concerted action" to address desperate need. "Humanitarian intervention cannot be impartial to the Serb militiaman and the Muslim civilian, or the machete-wielding Hutu and the Tutsi victim." Washington particularly objected to a 1994 International Red Cross (IRC) code of conduct that reaffirmed the independence of humanitarian groups from governments. The Red Cross view, complained a 2002 USAID report, "has internal inconsistencies: for example, local societies must be respected, even if their values and practices violate human rights and humanitarian law. And ... it ignores the existence of predatory political actors in most complex emergencies.... The IRC's doctrine of discretion and silence ... has shaded into complicity with war crimes." The result, it declared, was the "well-fed dead."46 Aggression had continued, and vulnerable civilians had been kept alive by the Red Cross only to then be "brutalized by war, human rights violations, and other forms of abuse." That was why force might be necessary-and legitimate. Such "blurring of the distinction between humanitarian and military operations" held enormous promise for Washington. It might turn traditional humanitarianism upside down, but in Washington it was now being proclaimed as the modern way to deal with the postCold War world of failing states.47 Traditional humanitarianism was a response to a world of suffering too enormous and unjust to overcome in any foreseeable future; and so its guiding ethos was compa.s.sion, charity, and a helping hand extended, where possible, without taking sides. During the Cold War such humanitarianism, whatever its benefactions, had not proved a particularly useful ideological weapon for Washington. The United States had used the necessity of fighting Communism to excuse the difficulties of modernizing in perilous contexts, while pointing to atrocities and famines in Communist areas as evidence of the draconian character of the ruling regimes.

For much of the Cold War, the divide between politically neutral humanitarianism and state-led developmental aid was relatively clear-and the clarity wasn't always to Washington's advantage.48 In the Third World in the 1960s and 1970s, famine and war were widely blamed on Western power and its influence over the character of its client states. But with Third World state-centric developmental strategies discredited by the 1990s-nowhere more so than among leaders of the human rights community-Washington began to challenge traditional humanitarianism and its principles of neutrality and universality, its willingness to keep silent and work in conjunction with repressive states to reach victims. Now a developmental politics could be clothed in a muscular new humanitarian garb. International NGOs need no longer feel compelled to work "at arm's length" from Washington and other governments, a 2003 USAID report urged. The relationship could become "intimate." "Forceful humanitarian intervention," Washington liked to say, was something new under the sun.49 The idea that NGOs and human rights groups might involve themselves in efforts to overthrow or reconstruct authoritarian regimes had once been anathema to them. "We have not the slightest intention of dabbling in the domestic affairs of other nations," Peter Benenson wrote in June 1961 in the first Amnesty newsletter.50 But as times changed, Washington saw its opportunity to draw these groups in. The world's sole remaining superpower had "a moral obligation to take a stand against human atrocities whenever and wherever they occur."51 NATO's intervention in Kosovo epitomized this "close new relationship between humanitarian, political, and military interests," a USAID overview a.s.serted as the 1990s came to an end.52 Victims were everywhere-in disasters, failing states, regime-sponsored atrocities, and genocide-and in all these cases, their suffering legitimized intervention, or so the argument went. Humanitarian war marked the apotheosis of a new "altruistic" spirit. From the early 1990s on, leading American human rights groups applauded the new humanitarianism Washington and London were espousing. They could have argued that in extreme cases military intervention could reflect a cra.s.s pursuit of national interests and still be morally necessary: thus Vietnam's invasion of Cambodia in 1978, which ended the Khmer Rouge atrocities; India's attack on East Pakistan in 1971, leading to the creation of Bangladesh; and Tanzania's invasion of Uganda in 1979, which destroyed Idi Amin's murderous regime. But they did not make this argument; those invasions, all opposed by Washington, had been largely ignored by human rights leaders.53 The new era of humanitarianism grew out of something else: Washington's need to keep refurbishing faith in the singularity of its moral status. An America-centered order did not demand that Washington accept responsibility for the state the world was in but only that it help those it judged in need-or, when possible, rout the perpetrators of atrocities and violence.

Human Rights Watch shared this view, even to the point of endorsing military intervention in humanitarian crises. The most "dramatic development in 1999," it reported, was the use of military force to "stop crimes against humanity." Intervention in Kosovo by members of the international community signaled a "new readiness" to use "extraordinary resources, including troops," to address such crimes.54 Washington's interests were not dissected; its motives were left shrouded in a cloud of inspiring rhetoric. "Broader approaches" had become the new orthodoxy.

Few groups stood quite so distinctly outside this new consensus as Doctors Without Borders (Medecins San Frontieres, or MSF), which was awarded the n.o.bel Peace Prize in 1999. Founded in 1971 in the aftermath of the Biafran secession, MSF broke with other relief organizations: "When we saw people dying on the other side of the frontiers, we asked ourselves, 'what is this border? It doesn't mean anything to us.'"55 MSF sought "to bear witness to the fate of populations as precisely as possible, not as defenders of human rights, but simply as direct witnesses to the suffering of the sick and injured and to the stolen dignity of so many men, women, and children all over the world."56 In doing so, it questioned the validity of any "universal moral conscience" based on the operations of a handful of states.57 "We are invited to believe that ethics and politics have become reconciled on the initiative of a handful" of powerful states, warned an MSF leader.58 The very same powers that have enshrined humanitarian principles into law are subverting them; they are cloaking their political agendas in humanitarian language and co-opting the humanitarian ideal into the service of other causes,"59 the director of MSF-US argued in 2003.

MSF cautioned against the current thinking among many NGOs and UN groups that humanitarian action ought to become part of an integrated system: "But integrated into what? Integrated into policy in the same way as are the use of force, economic development or even justice in a global quest for consistency and effectiveness?" While these groups may find such a vision seductive, "whether because of conviction, lack of financial or political independence or simple pragmatism," ultimately "the integration of humanitarian action into a system is tantamount to the disintegration of its very humanitarian values."60 Of course, "not for one minute" does such an outcome "trouble those who want to make humanitarian action into a simple tool at the disposal of politics"61-that is, Washington. The right to intervene, MSF concludes, simply does not exist in international humanitarian law; the very idea "may even, in a monstrous misinterpretation, mean killing in the name of humanitarianism."62 Speaking for others poses further moral contradictions, for the unheard are not, in fact, unable to speak. "To put it another way," MSF explains, "when inst.i.tutions like the UN Security Council approach aid organizations and ask what can be done for the Liberian people, these organizations would be better advised to refer them to the parties most affected by the conflict-the Liberians who have attempted to express their grievances, by piling up bodies in front of the US Emba.s.sy in Monrovia, for example." Giving the powerless a voice in the public arena, hearing rather than speaking for, transforming pity into the demand for justice-these aims require that rights advocates separate themselves from "all forms of power and politics, however respectable they may be." Otherwise, confronted by desperate suffering, they end up simply absorbing and recycling it in preconceived conceptions of what is just and what is unjust.63 Humanitarianism, argues MSF, cannot be "traded or made conditional"; to do so inevitably leads to the sacrifice of the most vulnerable.64 The group calls for a ma.s.sive paradigm shift. Consider, for example, the pervasive business practices in which defense of patents rewarded not invention but corporate profits and that, in aiming at increasing profits rather than the alleviation of suffering, have contributed to a veritable "denial of medicine for most of humanity.... Only 1% of medicines brought to market treat diseases like tuberculosis, malaria, and sleeping sickness that most affect people in developing countries."65 In challenging the profits of pharmaceutical companies and the skewed priorities of medical research, MSF stepped into the second current of human rights.

RIGHTS AS A SYSTEM OF POWER.

More than any previous president, Clinton called on NGOs to strengthen civil society abroad. He established Democracy Corps, which sent teams of Americans throughout the former Soviet Union "to overcome bottlenecks to democratic development." He called for cooperation among American business, labor, political, and volunteer organizations to develop the needed "independent, civil, and services sectors in the new democracies." His often cautious secretary of state, Warren Christopher, was far from cautious about these audacious efforts: "We have to help others build up the inst.i.tutions that make democracy possible," he said.66 His State Department colleague, Morton Halperin, director of the Democracy Project, was blunter: "We divide the world in two. Those countries who choose democracy, we help. In those countries which do not choose, we create conditions where they will choose it."67 Later an important ancillary was enunciated in a Council for Foreign Relations study headed by Christopher's successor as secretary of state, Madeleine Albright: "Unconst.i.tutional actions that threaten democracy from within a state should be resisted by a collective international response as readily as are external aggressions against a sovereign state."68 By the early 1990s, the shift toward the new paradigm of economic-based democratization was well under way,69 a framework designed to offer a "common vocabulary" and a "lens though which a developing country's political environment is a.n.a.lyzed and evaluated."70 Since then, a wide array of groups (AID; the State, Treasury, and Commerce Departments; the Trade and Development Agency; the Export-Import Bank; the Overseas Private Investment Security Council; the African Development Foundation; the Inter-American Foundation) have codified it. Here, as elsewhere, the rapid rise in funding has been impressive. In 1980, the United States and the European Union together spent some $20 million on "democracy-related foreign aid." By 2001, the figure had risen to $571 and $392 million, respectively, and by 2006 to some $2 billon for the United States and $3.5 billion for the EU.71 And these sums do not even include funding by corporations, nongovernmental foundations, and quasi-governmental groups like the NED, not to mention billionaire activists such as George Soros.

By insisting that everything was related to everything else-civil and political liberties to the market, a free press to civil society, privatization to transparency and accountability, electoral politics to the media-national security managers sought to legitimize almost every kind of involvement. For Washington it was the opening of a new ideological era. In the words of a 1999 State Department report, "We are rapidly moving toward a global network of government officials, activists, thinkers, and pract.i.tioners who share a common commitment to democracy, the universality of human rights, and respect for the rule of law."72 While human rights groups may have been convinced of their influence on policy, in fact Washington had often defined these issues to suit its own interests years before. Almost every area the groups now took up-the role of NGOs, of women, of the media; of civil society; of child soldiers; of the "rule of law"-had already been considered in an outpouring of government studies and funded research that dwarfs independent human rights literature. The need to ensure that civil freedoms were not subordinated to economic policies was already a leitmotif of USAID's 1991 Democracy and Governance programs, which themselves drew on a wealth of preexisting national security discussions. When Human Rights Watch cautioned in 1995 against "the unbridled pursuit of economic development in the absence of the vigorous promotion of human rights,"73 Washington had a plethora of reports already at hand arguing for an "integrated developmental agenda ... inextricably linked to democratization and good governance." When rights groups began to link the rule of law, or freedom of the press, and women's rights with progress in human rights,74 when they began to laud the role of NGOs in building up civil society and to focus on corporate operations and "good governance," Washington was ready with studies designed to promote NGOs, transparency, and democratization. When Human Rights Watch protested the "conceptual attack launched by abusive governments against such basic principles as the indivisibility and universality of human rights" and invoked "the duty to ensure that international a.s.sistance does not underwrite repression,"75 Washington was ready with reams of reports underwriting just such a position.76 Human Rights Watch's position that "respect for civil and political rights is the best guarantee of the economic rights that abusive proponents of development-first theories purport to champion"77 had far earlier advocates in the national security establishment. Washington had concluded that calling rights "indivisible" would ensure the primacy of "individual rights" far more effectively than arguing that civil and political rights took precedence over economic ones.

By seeking to make Washington live up to its rhetoric, human rights organizations were once again spotlighting the "enforcement gap" between ideals and policy. But the deeper question is one of language and definitions-not only what can be done about the evils of the world but why those problems are defined as they are and, especially, who gets to do the defining. Reading national security doc.u.ments takes one into a world of think tanks, consultants, and task forces who share a vocabulary, code words, and a.n.a.logies. On one level, this overlapping language may have signaled Washington's growing acceptance of ideas about human rights. But since it is the business of the national security managers to develop, propagate, and fine-tune this language, at a deeper level it marked a diminution: proximity to power wore down the biting edge of the human rights world and led it, almost inevitably, to buy into too many a.s.sumptions at too high a price.

CIVIL SOCIETY: n.o.bODY IN CHARGE.

"Civil society"-meaning, in general, lawyers, academics, journalists, ministers, managers, and other professionals78-has been a much favored term both of human rights groups and of Washington since the Clinton years. (Washington dropped its late 1960s to mid-1980s predecessor, "civic society," out of worry that it might suggest an unwanted "society wide mobilizing" of groups.)79 The new buzzword was hard to define with exact.i.tude and contentiously fought over in academic literature, but highly useful to Washington for all that.80 Both Washington and human rights leaders applauded the rise of civil society as the best alternative to centralized state power. As one USAID report explained: "Civil society-from human rights organizations to the media-are often the leading voices for change around the world. And they often bear the brunt of the pushback we are seeing by those in power who feel threatened by reform."81 It is the "domestic counterpart" of the "transnational networks" that encourage "interaction" and "global outlooks"82-which is why democracies must speak out when the international links of local NGOs are challenged and why the Department of State must partner with NGOs "to defend their work worldwide." For Washington, NGOs are nothing less than "America's invisible sector" of influence.83 Washington's views have policy implications, of course. "The emphasis on transforming the structures of governance in the polity is the functional equivalent of structural adjustment programs in the economic arena," explained one USAID report.84 "Partic.i.p.ation, thoughtfully handled, can be quietly subversive," moving nations "from statist to free-market economies."85 A weakened state serves this end beautifully-the devolution of power undercuts future demagogues, reducing the temptation to revert to centralizing authoritarianism.86 A large number of groups as well as a lack of vertical organization also undermines any possibility of state control-which, for Washington, is the ideal situation. When "n.o.body is in charge,"87 its economic and political influence encounters less effective resistance.88 This is what Washington understands by an "open society."

Yet what is to be done if the "political will for decent governance and structural reform is lacking" in a nation singled out by Washington? During the Clinton and the George W. Bush years, the answer was unambiguous: "Reform minded elements"-a much favored Cold War phrase-in the upper echelons should be "encouraged to link up with pressures from below in civil society, persuading ruling elites of the need for inst.i.tutional reform to improve governance." Outside influences (Washington, other governments, NGOs) might then "tip the balance through persuasive engagement with the rulers and the society."89 Thus the United States "should identify and try to strengthen the hand of reform-oriented ministers, agency heads, and provincial governors." Even if backing these reformers does not immediately succeed, it represents an "investment in the future, when a political shift gives reformers real power."90 Local NGOs, USAID commentaries pointed out, are not cla.s.sic domestic political operators or movement groups. They depend largely on outside financial support. Very rudimentary groups need a.s.sistance in setting up a "governing board" and a "formal personnel structure." At first, they are often small and unstable,91 but as they develop a management structure, they can partic.i.p.ate in "learning networks" and conferences that enhance their fund-raising abilities. At this point, they can be "selected" as "partners," receiving umbrella grants from external actors, whose role is to build them up and "to bring the international perspective"92-hardly a peripheral concern.93 This point of view is sometimes criticized within the bureaucracy. "'Civil society,' I really hate this term," one USAID worker stationed in Africa complained in 1996. It sets up a construct of "inherently evil governments versus inherently virtuous civil society. We tend to romanticize that the way forward in this region, which is so beset by tumult and conflict, is through the empowerment of civil society.... In fact, civil society has the same vulnerability as government." Others have pointed to the chaos of hundreds of NGOs pouring into a country (like Rwanda) with no coordination at all. What are the implications of a small country's having two hundred international NGOs? Do they squash growth?94 The Department of State's own "guiding principles" on NGOs, issued in 2006, make explicit a set of long-held a.s.sumptions. Other governments have no right to repress these groups-a hospitable environment free from intimidation is imperative. So are the rights to receive funding from foreign ent.i.ties, to have unrestricted access to foreign-based media, and to cooperate with foreign governments. When these principles are violated, "democratic nations" must rise in their defense.95 A "free media" is, of course, essential to civil society. But how to build it in places that have never had an independent press, and how to ensure that anti-American views do not predominate?96 A 1999 USAID report laid out the strategy: the local U.S. Emba.s.sy, sometimes in partnership with European powers or NGOs, might advise on needed laws, run seminars, provide a wide a.s.sortment of "U.S.-based training to media lawyers and a.s.sistance," and offer rewards for excellence in reporting, including trips to the United States and additional funding. These tactics all require close personal contact-offering connections and access to "the world."97 As detailed in the report, the approach is impressively hands-on. Representatives on the ground are asked to catalogue the various media outlets along with number and types of journalists, their areas of interest, levels of professional training, salaries, bonuses, and political orientations. They are