Spoils for which victor? Human rights within the democratic state

Abstract

The two big ethical ideas to emerge victorious from the short twentieth century were human rights and democracy. Initially an old trope revived to rally elite morale during the Second World War, the first of these (human rights) was useful to the designers of the second, the controlled democracies that were then being constructed in the loser-states of Germany, Italy and Japan. After this brief moment centre-stage, however, both rather lost their universalist lustre, with human rights being sidetracked off into an international arena of pious declarations and unenforceable agreements while a respect for state sovereignty that was indifferent to domestic political arrangements fast became the norm at the UN. Their time came again in the 1970s with both being dusted down for use once more, this time in the late Cold War as a convenient stick with which the West felt able to beat its communist rivals. Just as in 1945, the success that flowed from the breakthroughs of 1989 produced democratic/human rights nation-building on a grand scale. Almost to an (ex)-comrade, the post-Soviet and post-Soviet-bloc states chose forms of government that declared themselves to be democratic while at the same time ostensibly respectful of the human rights of all those within their borders. Federal arrangements were carefully designed, bicameral legislatures lovingly re-created from training sessions on Capitol Hill, presidents constituted to embody their states while being simultaneously dependant on the will of their people. And in very many of these schemes, overseeing this tumultuous worker-bee activities in these new hives of democratic freedom were the various Constitutional Courts, given over-riding responsibility for the protection of human rights.