Citizenship and Human Rights in the Age of Globalization.

Tony Evans [*]

At the heart of the historic struggle over legitimate universal human rights are two questions: What kind of rights? and whom do they benefit? The standard answer to the first question is that lists of legitimate human rights can be found within the pages of international law, and to the second that these rights offer protection to the disempowered, the vulnerable, and the weak from governments and other powerful actors. This article attempts to examine this standard answer from the perspective of the international political economy. It argues that far from offering protection to those unable to protect themselves, the once subversive idea of human rights is now used to lend legitimacy to the practices of powerful global economic actors. In particular, the emphasis on individualism and limited government, which civil and political freedoms support, has seen the rich accumulate an even greater share of wealth and resources and offered a justification for withdrawing welfare and social entitlements from the poo r. [1]

The argument is conducted in three stages. It begins by arguing that the rhetoric of universal human rights is increasingly used to promote both global and domestic economic interests. The definition of human rights adopted by the "neoliberal consensus," [2] which permits this approach, denies the possibility of delivering economic and social rights to excluded groups on the grounds that they are "unrealistic." Having established the dominance of a neoliberal view of human rights, the argument, through an examination of the idea of the international citizen, goes on to examine the neoliberal rationale for promoting civil and political rights. Finally, the argument concludes with a critique that focuses on three aspects of the idea of the international citizen: first, its statecentric character; second, its assumptions about the relationship between state and civil society; and third, assumptions about tolerance.

The Hegemony of Civil and Political Rights

With the end of the Cold War, resistance to the neoliberal approach to rights seems to have all but evaporated. The now-unmatched dominance of civil and political rights derives from a set of principles that emphasize the freedom of individual action, noninterference in the private sphere of economics, the right to own and dispose of property, and the important principle of laissez-faire. In the absence of any champion for economic and social rights, the neoliberal consensus upon which the practices of globalization are built has succeeded in establishing the language of civil and political rights as the acceptable voice--indeed the only legitimate voice--of human-rights talk. In the current period, legitimate human rights can be defined only as that set of rights that require government abstention from acts that violate the individual's freedom to innovate and to invest time, capital, and resources in processes of production and exchange. [3] For neoliberals, economic, social, and cultural claims may be legi timate aspirations, but they can never be rights. The move to reduce state support for economic and social programs in all Western countries during the last two decades should be seen as indicative of the predominance of the neoliberal approach to rights. [4]

Two broad arguments are used by neoliberals in support of human rights defined as civil and political rights, which I shall call, respectively, the altruistic arguments and the pragmatic arguments. Taken together, these arguments support the contention that neoliberals are concerned with promoting a particular set of human rights that places property rights at the top of any list of rights. The altruistic argument for promoting civil and political freedoms at the expense of economic and social rights is that encouraging free trade and ever greater levels of economic interconnectedness has a positive and beneficial effect on the human-rights record of countries that do not comply with internationally recognized human-rights standards. According to this argument, the social contacts generated by the unregulated exchange of goods and services is paralleled by an inevitable and unregulated exchange of moral values. If tyrannical governments want to enjoy the benefits of globalization and free trade, they cannot a void the transmission of ideas that make people more aware of their rights. Free trade, therefore, has an important educative role: it has the potential to raise peoples awareness to their rights and increases the demand to be treated in accordance with internationally agreed standards of civil and political rights. In short, free trade has a "civilizing" influence on the "uncivilized" and should be actively promoted in the name of human rights. [5]

According to the second argument--the pragmatic one--disrupting free trade over human-rights issues, perhaps by applying trade sanctions, has no practical value. This is for several reasons. First, under conditions of globalization, target countries have little difficulty in making alternative arrangements for the supply of essential goods, either legally or illegally. Second, to be effective, sanctions must be carefully targeted on those groups associated with tyrannical governments, rather than the wider population. The difficulties of achieving this task are immense and should not be underestimated. Third, and following from the above, the potential to "demonize" sanctioners offers a valuable propaganda opportunity, stimulating nationalist fervor and a greater resolve to resist external coercion. Sanctions may therefore help to prolong the life of an existing tyranny rather than bring about its reform or demise. Fourth, the international political frictions generated by sanctions may have implications for security if the target state and its allies decide to resist by whatever means at their disposal. Last, at the level of domestic politics, implementing sanctions brings economic consequences for manufacturing and service industries in the sanctioners' own country, and may harm the sanctioners' own economic interests. For these reasons, Robert Hormats, vice chairman of Goldman Sachs, argues that although "there's been a lot of progress on human rights ... I don't think linking trade and human rights is very productive" (Hormats 1998). [6]