‘Whose rights are human rights?’ The ambiguous emergence of human rights and the demise of Kissingerism

Abstract

During the Seventies, human rights moved from the periphery to the center of American foreign policy. This action – I argue in the paper – reflected a double-headed and contradictory interest in human rights. From a liberal perspective, human rights concerns were a criticism about the mistakes of the global containment. By reinforcing morality in foreign policy – liberals argued – the United States could both develop a new foreign policy for a more interdependent and global international system and rediscover the best American tradition. For conservatives, human rights came to both exemplify the problem of dissidents in the Communist countries and to represent a useful weapon to fight both the Soviets and the American supporters of bipolar détente. These two approaches overlapped, intertwined, and reinforced each other, contributing to the erosion of Kissinger's realistic détente and to the permanence of human rights concern in American politics but, because of this intrinsic ambiguity, they never evolved into a unifying new consensus.