2007

Humanitarian fundamentalism (*)

Danilo Zolo

1. A dramatic context

Michael Ignatieff delivered his Tanner Lectures on human rights at Princeton University in 2000 - one year, that is, after the end of NATO's "humanitarian war" against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and one before the terrorist attacks of September 11th that led to a series of preemptive wars by the United States against "the axis of evil" (the attack on the twin towers, incidentally, took place not far from the prestigious university in New Jersey that hosts these Lectures). The context in which this eminent Anglo-Saxon intellectual took his stand on issues critical to world order was therefore a highly dramatic one, something that it is wise to bear in mind in order to grasp the political as well as the theoretical significance of his arguments. In the present essay, keeping this context in mind I will comment on Ignatieff's arguments on topics such as the comparison of the values of Western society with those of other civilizations, the universality of human rights doctrine, and the legitimacy of military interventions in defence of these rights.

Ignatieff basically upholds the following theories in his Lectures:

  1. The Western doctrine of human rights has had extraordinary success worldwide, yet this does not substantiate claims that it has an ethical/philosophical "foundation" or "justification". The validity of human rights can be affirmed only in historical/political and pragmatic terms, not metaphysical or even theological ones.
  2. A sober and rigorous conception of human rights recognizes that the latter do not address every legitimate expectation of human beings, but only those related to "negative liberties". The defence of rights guarantees all individuals the capacity to act freely in order to achieve rational goals. Human rights theory is based on the assumption of political individualism and the related supremacy of individual rights, not only as regards the ties of social solidarity and duties of political loyalty, but also the so-called "collective rights".
  3. Human rights doctrine, freed from metaphysical emphasis and selectively identified with the defence of "negative liberties", enjoys true humanitarian universality, a fact which gives it "validity" outside of the West's cultural sphere and allows it to be legitimately proposed to civilizations and cultures around the world. Human rights are perfectly compatible with the "moral pluralism" that characterizes today's world.
  4. The universality of human rights is not matched today by their universal international defence, since it is challenged by the particularism of national states and the principle of the inviolability of their borders. Yet state sovereignty, even if inalienable in principle, cannot prevent military power from being used in certain instances to enforce the respect of human rights within a state's own borders, as occurred, legitimately, in the cases of Iraq, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Kosovo.

The following paragraphs will critique these four theories.

2. Rights without foundations

The argument that human rights doctrine has no sound epistemological and deontological basis is rarely made in the West. This is undoubtedly one of the most interesting aspects of Ignatieff's Lectures. The most authoritative and official international documents - take, for example, the European Union's recent Charter of Fundamental Rights - generally take for granted that the so-called "fundamental rights" share the characteristics of "indivisibility and universality" (1). This wording, coined at the United Nations Conference on human rights held in Vienna in 1993, has been used polemically ever since against representatives of non-Western cultures, particularly Islamic, Hindu and Chinese/Confucian ones (2). From the standpoint of these cultures, human rights are closely intertwined with Western standards of rationality, as well as with Western juridical formalism, individualism, and liberalism.

At a theoretical level there are authors - Jürgen Habermas and John Rawls, for example - who, following Kant's reasoning, contend that human rights can have solid cognitive and normative foundations, making it quite obvious that they can be proposed to all humankind without falling into any form of cultural imperialism. In the view of Habermas, human rights theory can be construed as a core of moral intuitions where the universalistic religions and great metaphysical philosophies that have arisen in human history converge: it is a normative core that therefore enjoys a transcendental universality that goes well beyond the West's historical and cultural affairs (3).

Ignatieff emphatically rejects this "secular religion", a form of self-referential "idolatry" where, he writes, humanism ends up worshipping itself. He allows without hesitation that human rights doctrine is rooted in the Western tradition, and that it arose in a precise historical period following violent social and political conflicts. Human rights did not gain ground, as neo-Kantians instead seem to believe, thanks to the ecumenical convergence of irenical philosophies, or to processes of ethical sublimation of political strife and clashes between social interests. In Ignatieff's view there are no rational arguments to prove the universality of human rights doctrine, if the latter is understood as a general theory of justice and of the "good life": categories such as natural law or the teleologisms of creation or the very notion of the intrinsic moral quality (or indeed "sanctity") of human beings are "idolatrous" assumptions that lack any rational foundation (4).

Furthermore, according to Ignatieff, it is illusory to think of the catalogue of human rights as a single, interconnected system of normative principles: the fervent human rights activists who take the universal Declaration of '48 as their ideological banner are unaware of the deep tensions running through "fundamental rights" charters. The rights to freedom and to property, for instance, are in conflict with social rights, which are inspired by the value of equality, while the right to security increasingly threatens that to privacy. It could also be added that economic rights contrast with the safeguarding of the environment, while private ownership of the mass media endangers the intellectual integrity of citizens, particularly that of minors. The notion that rights can act, as Ronald Dworkin argues, as "trumps" for resolving political conflicts is naive and false, since referring to rights often sharpens tensions rather than resolving them, particularly when the rights in question are in contrast with another (5).

Hence Ignatieff reintroduces some of the arguments that Norberto Bobbio has authoritatively, although single-handedly, put forward in Italy for decades. In Bobbio's view human rights doctrine lacks both analytic precision and philosophical foundations (6). The rights listed in Western Bills of Rights have historically been subject to continuous revision, are worded using inaccurate and semantically-ambiguous terms, have a heterogeneous nature and are, above all, interspersed with deontic antinomies that frustrate any attempt to give them an organic, consistent basis: "rights that are fundamental but antinomic cannot, none of them, have absolute foundations, foundations that make both a right and its opposite indisputable and inexorable" (7).

To bear out and buttress both Ignatieff's and Bobbio's arguments, it could be added that human rights doctrine seems to lack criteria - to use a systemic lexicon - of cognitive self-regulation and self-planning. It lacks a conceptual framework that enables rights to be precisely pinpointed, defined and catalogued. Even the well-known taxonomy proposed by Thomas H. Marshall - civil rights, political rights, and social rights - as useful as it may be, is still of a historical and sociological nature and is, moreover, modelled upon the last three centuries of English history (8).

Consequently "the catalogue of rights" has a tendency to expand cumulatively over consecutive "generations", or thanks to normative interpolations based on mere de facto circumstances (9). Some Western philosophers and jurists have even proposed extending the theory of fundamental rights to human embryos, to non-human living creatures and even to inanimate beings. But it is clear that an anomic expansion of the list of fundamental rights raises an indisputable aporia: if everything is fundamental, then nothing is fundamental. Yet it is evident that fundamental rights cannot be all the same - that is, of equal normative weight - all the more so when they are in conflict among themselves. Alain Laquièze has rightly argued that the more the predicate "fundamental" is used, incorporating a growing range of different rights, the greater will be the risk of a clash between the fundamental nature of rights and the need to make them relative to one another and conditional on other competing rights (10).

The hypothesis of the philosophical foundations and normative universality of human rights is therefore a dogmatic postulate of natural law and ethical rationalism that lacks theoretical confirmation, a hypothesis that is challenged through sound arguments both by Western philosophies of a historicist and realist slant and by non-Western cultures. From this conclusion Bobbio has drawn an important practical corollary: that which is important for the concrete implementation of human rights is not proof of their universal soundness and validity (11). On the contrary, this proof risks making the very language of rights intolerant and aggressive. What really matters is that subjective rights enjoy broad political consensus and that "rights language" becomes widespread as an expression of social expectations and demands. Yet consensus - and Bobbio seems well aware of this - is a purely empirical and historically contingent matter, as well as being difficult to establish with exactness: it justifies neither universalist claims nor proselytizing. What is more, the consensus and the proliferation of bills of rights has not been matched - or has been matched only very partially and ambiguously - by a concrete implementation of rights, even in the West. It is one thing to demand rights, warns Bobbio, and another to actually defend them (12).

Ignatieff's position is much less precise than Bobbio's and, despite his profession of secularism, does not lack moralistic and paternalistic overtones. For Ignatieff, human rights doctrine derives from the notion of the unity of the human species, and from the moral intuition that every member of this species ought to receive equal moral consideration and must therefore not be humiliated or subjected to unwarranted suffering (13). The historical success of this notion is the vector of humanity's moral progress, and it is this progress that makes the Western human rights doctrine plausible and strong. In Ignatieff's view, in fact, it can be empirically established, from a historical and pragmatic perspective, that wherever individuals are granted fundamental rights it is less likely that they will be discriminated against, oppressed or abused. Rights language, born in the West, has spread all over the world because rights help the most vulnerable individuals in the face of unjust and oppressive regimes. (14). This, in the view of Ignatieff, is the profound reason for their de facto universalism, their universal spread - a phenomenon that has swept especially, and not by chance, across the theocratic, traditionalist and patriarchal regimes that proliferate throughout the non-Western world, particularly in Islamic countries.

It is here, I believe, in these moralistic and paternalistic ambiguities, that lies the seed of that "humanitarian fundamentalism" which, as we shall see, ends up by bringing Ignatieff's pragmatic and secular universalism close to the religious and aggressive universalism of the U.S. neoconservatives.

3. Negative liberty, freedom to participate, and collective rights

The defence of human rights, according to Ignatieff, ensures that individuals have the free "capacity to act", or agency, to achieve rational objectives. (15). The philosophical and political assumption underlying human rights doctrine, he argues, is political individualism, and its basic substance is the defence of "negative liberty", according to the meaning Isaiah Berlin gave to the notion in contrast to that of "positive liberty".

There is no doubt that individualism - as pointed out, once again, by Bobbio - is the general philosophical and political assumption underlying human rights doctrine (16). At the dawn of the Renaissance, individualist anthropologists encouraged in Europe - and, it should be recalled, in Europe alone - a complete reversal of the relationship between individuals and political authority. In the wake of the organicist conception of social life - the Aristotelian and Aristotelian/Thomist model - which made an individual's integration into the group the very condition of his or her humanity and rationality, came the natural law approach (17). The priority changed from that of the duty of subjects towards political (and religious) authorities to that of the rights of citizens, and the duty of public authorities to acknowledge, protect, and finally even to advance these rights.

Thus in the modern (sovereign, national, secular) European state the original deontic notion - duty - left the field clear for a new, essentially opposite, deontic notion, that of the individual expectation or demand, collectively acknowledged and protected by way of a "right". It was a right interpreted as a jus, as opposed to the lex, i.e. as opposed to the rule of the sovereign and of the "law", which is the expression and guarantee of the sovereign's potestas.

The idea of a natural order characterized by harmony, rules and hierarchical structure declined, giving way to the metaphysical and social supremacy of human beings and their individual "consciences" as a space of moral autonomy and political freedom, albeit within a social context ruled by reason, morals, and law. (18).

Ignatieff goes far beyond what could be seen as the political and philosophical koiné of modern Europe, which only Marxism, in its most "heretical" and radical forms, sought to resist, in vain, in the past two centuries. Following Berlin's approach, Ignatieff not only espouses the classically-liberal version of European political individualism, but, as we shall see, believes that the whole array of rights can be crammed into the normative space of "negative liberty".

The classical liberal tradition, which was based on the pre-eminence of individual liberty and private property, essentially interpreted political liberty as an "absence of constraints" and sphere of political non-interference. In John Locke's Second Treatise of Government, as in the equally-renowned pages of John Stuart Mill's "On Liberty", liberty is identified as a series of rights that ought "not be hindered" by the behaviour of others. Along this line Berlin, in his famous work Two Concepts of Liberty, not only makes a distinction between "liberal liberty" and the pre-modern notion of liberty as political citizenship, but also sets it against "positive liberty", in the various senses that this notion has been given in liberal-democratic and democratic-socialist thought over the last two centuries (19).

The positive sense of the word "liberty" derives from an individual's aspiration to be "master of him or herself"; in other words, the will not only to be free, but also "independent", i.e. to have one's own personal identity and the capacity to plan one's life and shape one's destiny. "Positive liberty", in this sense, implies freedom from need as a condition for the freedom to participate, deeply and intensely, in social interaction and communication. And this requires that individuals have a certain degree of thoughtfulness that enables them to critically analyze the inputs of their process of acculturation, and to manage the pressures to conform exerted by their social environment.

Clearly the array of norms covered by the expression "positive liberty" requires that individuals be granted not only rights to liberty, but also political and social rights, not to mention the so-called "new rights" (gender equality, the environment, the rights of foreigners and immigrants, and so forth). The juridical guarantee of the fundamental rights to liberty for citizens with uncertain identities and little autonomy risks being devoid of meaning: this is particularly true in today's high-tech societies. In such societies the exercise of fundamental rights is necessarily linked to what could be called the fundamental "new right" upon which the effectiveness of all other fundamental rights increasingly depends: habeas mentem, that is an individual's capacity to manage, screen and rationally interpret the growing flow of multimedia information inundating him or her.

But "positive liberty" also requires, as Will Kymlicka has very ably argued (20), that individuals be protected not as abstract existential monads but as members of a cultural community whose identity is constituted, and whose capacity for self-planning is nourished, through their critical interaction with that community. From this interaction stems that delicate and critical dialectic between individual rights and "collective rights" - something which Ignatieff resolves in just a few sentences, mechanically subordinating "collective rights" to individual ones (21) - that no classic liberal theory (no "negative liberty" theory) is able to formulate and resolve, if not in an oligarchic and discriminatory manner. And it is not by chance that the entire theory of "collective rights" or "group rights" - consider in particular the right to speak one's own language or to practise one's own religion - is today still very poorly developed within the Western juridical debate. And there are also authors - Jürgen Habermas, among others - who argue that it is impossible, or ill-advised, to develop these collective interests into the positive form of rights to be exercised by individual and/or collective subjects within national or international jurisdictions (22).

The acknowledgement and defence of "collective rights" - as non-Western authors have stated for decades, by Amartya Sen's leave (23) - remain fundamental conditions for the affirmation of individual rights, yet are at the same time in friction with them: we need only think of the defence of the identity and political independence of linguistic and cultural minorities and weaker peoples - "stateless nations", of the struggle against economic and social discrimination by entire categories of migrant-workers within national societies, of the fight against poverty and epidemic diseases in whole swathes of continents, of debt-cancellation for the poorest countries (24).

According to the liberal Berlin - and the liberal Ignatieff who echoes his theories - these problems do not have relevant connections either with the liberty of individuals or with their set of rights. In their view, "negative liberty" is rather the only political ideal that is compatible with an authentic conception of ethical and philosophical pluralism, and with the recognition of the insurmountable fallibility of our metaphysical and religious beliefs. It is substantially for these reasons that Ignatieff, against the rationalist metaphysics that champion "positive liberty" for all, proposes containing the entire range of individual rights (and basically also that of the collective ones) within the area of the liberty not to be hindered by oppressive powers in the spheres of personal integrity, economic activity, and privacy. However, as Amy Gutmann has observed (25), on the one hand this proposal overlooks, even dismisses, the expectations of a vast part of the world's inhabitants, while on the other it disavows an empirical fact that is difficult to dispute. It fails to acknowledge that rights language and claims today go far beyond the sphere of the mere liberty not to be hindered or oppressed.

With respect to rights language, one need only think of documents such as (to cite only the most recent) the 1966 Covenant on Political and Civil Rights, the Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights of the same year, the 1981 African Charter on Human and People's Rights, the 1992 Islamic Tunis Declaration and, finally, the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union (December 2000). To these should be added the long series of international documents "specifying" charts of individual and collective rights: the Convention on the Political Rights of Women (1952), the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948), the Declaration of the Rights of the Child (1959), the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples (1960) and the Declaration on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (1963) (26). It would be nonsensical to argue that the normative language of these documents concerns exclusively, or even principally, the rights to liberty and to resistance against oppression and leaves out the whole range of civil, political, social, cultural and economic rights and those related to bioethics, the environment and the protection of personal information, as well as the so-called "collective rights".

As to rights claims, we need but recall, with respect to individual rights, the long struggle for gender equality by the feminist movements, not to mention the peace and environmental movements, whose claims go well beyond the normative logic of "liberty from hindrance". And the resistance of the Palestinian people against the ethnocide that the state of Israel continues to inflict on them, with the complicity of the West and part of the Arab world, is emblematic in terms of "collective rights". In Palestine, the identity and dignity of a people is not traded for the easier satisfaction of individual matters of personal integrity and private wellbeing - take, for example (but it is not the only one), the tragic figure of the suicide bomber.

4. Minimal universality

Following Berlin, Ignatieff has deprived human rights doctrine of every type of metaphysical/religious dimension and has condensed its normative range into the sphere of "negative liberty": in his view, this double operation fulfils the conditions that make it possible for human rights to enjoy that "minimalist" universalism that makes them compatible with a wide range of civilizations, cultures, and religions. Human rights can enjoy universal consensus as a "thin theory" regarding only what is legally right, not what is good in absolute terms. A theory that limits itself to defining the minimum conditions that make life worth living can be accepted and practiced with enthusiasm throughout the world (27).

In this way, Ignatieff argues, human rights will no longer be perceived by other civilizations as a neo-imperialist intrusion, an imposition of the Western world's lifestyle, values, and vision. Rights will become a "local" force everywhere, strengthening those who are weak and those struggling against despotic regimes and oppressive social practices. The oppressed will enthusiastically wave the banner of rights themselves, rather than having it imposed upon them by Westerners through some form of constraint. Rights language will provide everyone with good arguments and effective instruments that enable them to "help themselves", to protect themselves as individuals from injustice, to entitle themselves, as individuals, to the right to "choose the good life as they see fit" (28).

Ignatieff explicitly rejects the critique that could be made of his individualistic approach, i.e. the desire to impose the Western notion of the individual upon the rest of the world's cultures. Ignatieff overrules this critique tout court: the primary ally of cultural diversity, he argues, is in fact moral individualism, since an individualist philosophy cannot but side in defence of the various ways in which an individual chooses to live his or her life. Hence it is precisely a firm individualist approach that is able to reconcile the universalism of human rights with the pluralism of cultures and morals. Seen from this perspective, individualism is, for Ignatieff, the only successful response to the challenges to rights universalism coming from the Islamic world and Chinese/Confucian culture as well from post-modernist Western cultural currents, which are dangerously prone to ethical relativism (29).

In my view Ignatieff's argument is very weak. Its only merit can be found in its open rejoinder to the critiques levelled by non-Western actors at the universalistic claims of Western ethical/political values, starting in particular with the renowned Declaration of Bangkok of 1993. Yet the meagre space that Ignatieff dedicates both to Islamic political culture and to the question of Asian values demonstrates, once again, the ethnocentric bias of Western universalism and globalism. As they put forward proposals for global normative standardization, Western globalists invariably betray their limited interest in - and knowledge of - the cultural, political and juridical traditions with which they would like (or ought) to start a dialogue.

Strong critiques of Western universalism, as is known, have already been expressed both by Islamic - particularly in the experience of the Khomeini revolution - and Sub-Saharan African cultures. Today, South-East and North-East Asia is the region that displays the staunchest ideological resistance to the pressure of Western juridical and political structures. In countries such as Singapore, Malaysia, and China, the contrast between Asian and Western values has become particularly strong and appreciated thanks to charismatic leaders like Singapore's philosopher-king, Lee Kuan Yew, and Malaysia's prime minister, Mohammed Mahathir (30).

These authors have openly declared that Asian cultures cannot embrace the political values of Western modernity. In particular, they reject the liberal-democratic tradition and human rights doctrine. With its organic notion of family and society, the Confucian tradition provides some one-and-a-half billion people with the most suitable ideological framework for containing the anomic effects of the market economy and mitigating the disruptive forces of Western individualism and liberalism (31). Moreover, the defence of human rights and the principle of the juridical equality of individuals are of little interest to populations that are still for the most part oppressed by poverty and which were, until not long ago, helplessly subject to Western colonial abuses.

Others have pointed out that the Western idea of rights is itself alien to the Confucian ethos. The Chinese jurist Chung-Schu Lo has noted that in Chinese there has never been an expression that corresponds to the Western notion of "rights" (32). The first Chinese translators of Western political and juridical works, which appeared in Asia in the second half of the nineteenth century, were obliged to coin a new term, chuan-li (power-interest), in the attempt to find a meaningful translation of the concept. In the Confucian tradition, the dominating idea is not that of individual rights, but rather that of a "fundamental social relationship" (e.g. sovereign/subject, parents/children, husband/wife, first-born/second-born, friend/friend).

Challenge between parties in a legal case is also alien to Confucian culture. (33). In place of the frenetic competition between individuals, each trying to "assert their right" and win the case by prevailing against their opponent - a typical attitude in Western juridical formalism - the goal of "proceedings" in the Confucian tradition is reconciliation through compromise and mediation. François Jullien has even argued that in Chinese culture between moral requirements and the rule of power there is no form of legal mediation that is based on general and abstract rules, and follows set bureaucratic procedures (34). The compromise solution to controversies is based on the personalization of individual cases, not on their formal de-personalization.

Today this deeply anti-individualistic and anti-formalistic juridical approach is gaining strength rather than disappearing in many Asian countries, committed to reclaiming their political identity by prioritizing social harmony, family, respect for authority, and the sense of responsibility of civil servants. The same could be said, bearing in mind the many differences, of much of the Islamic world and African and American native cultures. From this perspective, the West is perceived as a place where community values are in decline thanks to a push towards unbridled individualism and a political vision that obliges states to acknowledge a growing number of individual rights that are not matched by duties or ties of solidarity.

It seems to me that Ignatieff has reached a dead-end in his attempt to defuse these critiques. Firstly, he has ignored the connections that link human rights theory to the broader Western vision of the world, which today's processes of globalization tend to amplify and spread around the world under the aegis of "modernization": the market economy, the will to dominate nature, faith in technological development, production efficiency, a drift towards acquisitive behaviours and consumerism, and the cult of speed. It makes little sense to suppose that Western human rights doctrine can be universally accepted outside the context of the world's Westernization, which coincides to a great extent with globalization. Secondly, Ignatieff has disregarded the whole issue of the intercultural - not unilateral or "humanitarian" - methods that can be used in an attempt to "translate" Western human rights language into the languages of other civilizations and cultures. Consider, for instance, of the efforts by Panikkar (and in some sense, also, by Höffe) to pinpoint "homeomorphic equivalents" of rights language in non-Western cultures and to use them to begin a "transcendental dialogue". (35).

In reality Ignatieff has tried to open up a "pragmatic" route to humanitarian fundamentalism: he has attempted to apply epistemological and political filters to a typical Western cultural product in order to make it a more palatable "humanitarian" export. He believes that human rights, pared down to an individualistic "negative liberty", can be offered to (suggested, recommended to, imposed upon) the whole world in a sort of sterilized "package", now available for any use because free of Western stigma, perfectly fungible and value free. The final result, paradoxically, is the reverse. Without realizing it - and herein lies his ethnocentric ingenuity - Ignatieff has in fact condensed the Western quintessence of human rights theory: its constitutive, indelible, individualistic bias and its most intrinsically liberal core, which is made up of "negative liberty" rights. We could also add that, from an epistemological viewpoint, Ignatieff is equally ingenuous in his claim that a normative theory of human rights can be made up of prescriptive propositions so lacking in axiological and value-judgement implications that they can be accepted within any ethical and religious context.

5. The use of force

In his Lectures Ignatieff dedicates much space to the subject of the coercive defence of human rights, with special reference to the use of military power on humanitarian grounds - so-called "humanitarian interventions" (36). Ignatieff's position on this crucial point - which is critical for understanding the general political meaning underlying his argument - is in conflict with the whole approach of his "thin theory" with regard to human rights. No matter how "thin", how focussed on the theme of the liberty and integrity of all human beings (none excluded), how rhetorically committed to condemning any instance of hostile behaviour by (non-Western) authoritarian powers against individuals, Ignatieff's thin universalism aligns itself sine glossa with the "humanitarian wars" that the United States and its European allies have waged in recent years in the name of human rights, particularly in the Balkans (37).

According to Ignatieff it is obvious that when a (non-Western) state jeopardizes the lives of its citizens, violating their fundamental rights, its sovereignty can no longer be respected. The international community has the duty to intervene by applying sanctions and, in the most serious cases, using military power: "There are no peaceful diplomatic remedies - Ignatieff peremptorily writes - when we are dealing with a Hitler, a Stalin, a Saddam or a Pol Pot" (38). War, therefore - even the "humanitarian war" decided unilaterally and illegally by NATO against the Federal Republic of Serbia - is legitimate and ethically irreproachable if its objective is the defence of human rights. It is a "just war" by definition since its goal is neither to take over territory nor to eradicate a state's sovereignty: Western countries engaged in humanitarian interventions in given countries have always used military power to bring about peace, democracy and stability, and have then withdrawn (39).

It is surprising that Ignatieff, who has written clear-sightedly and sometimes quite acutely on the subject of the defence of human rights, fails to write a single sentence about the compatibility of the use of weapons of mass destruction with the goal of protecting human fundamental rights. He doesn't even touch on the question of whether, in the name of the (supposed) defence of the fundamental rights of some individuals, it is legitimate to sacrifice the lives, physical integrity, property, feelings and values of (thousands of) innocents, as occurred in particular in the war for Kosovo. Nor does he ask who might be that neutral and impartial authority - an authority as universalistic as he claims human rights are - that is endowed with the moral, even more than political, power to determine the sacrifice of such innocent people.

Ignatieff forgets - something unforgivable in such a passionate advocate of "negative liberty" - that modern war is the most radical negation of individual rights, beginning with the right to life. Modern warfare, conducted with ever-more sophisticated and deadly weapons of mass destruction, is an event that cannot be fathomed by the categories of ethics and law. It is in its very nature to destroy - without proportion, without discrimination and without measure - the lives, possessions and rights of people, without regard to their responsible behaviour. It is essentially the carrying-out of a collective death sentence based on the presumed criminal responsibility of all of a state's citizens. Based on its consequences, modern warfare is therefore not easily distinguished from terrorism. And it is clear that these arguments are even more convincing when used against advocates of the universality of human rights.

Paradoxically, Ignatieff's only concern is that the humanitarian use of war be well-timed, effective and consistent, not belated and partial, as - he argues - was the case in Rwanda, Bosnia and Kosovo. Hence it is necessary for the humanitarian use of military power not to be conditioned by the political and strategic interests of great powers, nor even subject to the protection of international peace. To this end, he argues, the United Nations must be reformed so that the Security Council is authorized to systematically use military power to achieve humanitarian goals, not only to defend peace and international order. This would make "humanitarian" wars legitimate, and equally "successful", since the universality of human rights would coincide with the universality of armed interventions for their defence. And it would prevent "coalitions of the willing" from deciding all the same, and rightly so, to use military intervention, bypassing - and therefore discrediting - the authority of the United Nations.

In conclusion, however "thin", Ignatieff's ethical/juridical universalism, like all universalisms, has a tendency towards intolerance, aggressiveness, and a negation of the world's cultural diversity and complexity. Paradoxically, the whole operation of the pragmatic "secularization" of the human rights doctrine that Ignatieff proposes ends up by extolling, for the umpteenth time, the use of international military force by the Western powers. It is a conclusion in line with the "humanitarian fundamentalism" driving the hegemonic strategies of the United States and their European allies today, and provoking the bloody response of global terrorism, including suicide terrorism, worldwide. Nothing is more idolatrous and monotheistic (or naive) than the idea of a war waged in the name of human rights.

(Translated by Maria Carla Bellucci and Sara Benjamin)


Notes

*. See M. Ignatieff, Una ragionevole apologia dei diritti umani, Milano: Feltrinelli, 2003.

1. For a critical analysis of the 'Nizza Charter' cf. my "Una 'pietra miliare'?", Diritto pubblico, (2001), 3, pp. 1011-1030.

2. In Vienna the thesis of the indivisibility and the universality of human rights was polemically opposed to a number of Asian and Latin American countries.

3. According to Habermas "the essential content of the moral principles embodied in international law is in conformity with the normative substance of the great prophetic doctrines and metaphysical interpretations affirmed in world history" (J. Habermas, Vergangenheit als Zukunft, Zürich: Pendo Verlag, 1990). Cf. also J. Habermas, "Kants Idee des ewigen Friedens - aus dem historischen Abstand von 200 Jahren", Kritische Justiz, 28 (1995), pp. 293-319 (now also in J. Habermas, Die Einbeziehung des Anderen, Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1996), p. 307; see also J.M., Finnis Natural Law and Natural Rights, Oxford: Clarendon, 1980.

4. Cf. M. Ignatieff, Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001, pp. 53-4.

5. Ibid., p. 20.

6. Cf. N. Bobbio, L'età dei diritti, Torino: Einaudi, 1990, pp. 5-16. See also N. Luhmann, Grundrechte als Institution, Berlin: Dunker & Humblot, 1965; L. Baccelli, Il particolarismo dei diritti, Roma: Carocci, 1999.

7. Cf. N. Bobbio, L'età dei diritti, cit., p. 13

8. Cf. T.H., Marshall, Citizenship and Social Class, in T.H. Marshall, Class, Citizenship, and Social Development, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1964.

9. See P. Barile, in Diritti dell'uomo e libertà fondamentali, Bologna: il Mulino, 1984; R. Alexy, Theorie der Grundrechte, Baden-Baden: Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft, 1985; J. Rawls, "The Basic Liberties and Their Priorities", in S.M. McMurrin (ed.), The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, vol. 3, Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1982, pp. 1-87; G. Peces-Barba Martínez, Curso de derechos fundamentales, Madrid: Eudema, 1991; L. Ferrajoli, Diritti fondamentali, Roma-Bari: Laterza, 2001.

10. Cf. A. Laquièze, "The Rule of Law and National Sovereignty in France", in P. Costa and D. Zolo (eds), The Rule of Law. History, Theory and Criticism, Dordrecht: Springer, 2007.

11. Cf. N. Bobbio, L'età dei diritti, cit., pp. 14-6.

12. Cf. N. Bobbio, L'età dei diritti, cit., p. XX.

13. Cf. M. Ignatieff, Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry, cit., pp. 3-4 e p. 95.

14. Ibidem, p. 7.

15. Ibid., p. 57 ("the capacity of each individual to achieve rational intentions without let or hindrance").

16. Cf. N. Bobbio, L'età dei diritti, cit., pp. IX, 58 ss.

17. See M. Villey, La formation de la pensée juridique moderne, Paris: Monchretien, 1975.

18. Cf. E. Santoro, Autonomy, Freedom and Rights, Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2003.

19. Cf. I. Berlin, Two Concepts of Liberty, now in I. Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969.

20. See W. Kymlicka, Liberalism, Community and Culture, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.

21. Cf. M. Ignatieff, Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry, cit., pp. 66-7.

22. See J. Habermas, Kampf um Anerkennung im democratischen Rechtsstaat, Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1996; E. Vitale (ed.), Diritti umani e diritti delle minoranze, Torino: Rosenberg e Sellier, 2000; A. Facchi, I diritti nell'Europa multiculturale, Roma-Bari: Laterza, 2001, particularly pp. 21-36.

23. Cf. M. Ignatieff, Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry, cit., pp. 90-91. See on the matter A. Sen, Development as Freedom, New York: Anchor Books, 1999.

24. See "Banjul Charter on Human and People's Rights", of 1981 and the Islamic Declaration of Tunis, of 1992; cf. also R.J. Vincent, Human Rights and International Relations, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986, pp. 39-44.

25. Cf. A. Gutmann, "Introduction" in M. Ignatieff, Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry, cit., pp. XI-XIV.

26. Cf. N. Bobbio, L'età dei diritti, cit., pp. 29-33.

27. Cf. M. Ignatieff, Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry, cit., p. 56.

28. Ibid., pp. 7, 57.

29. Ibid. pp. 57-8.

30. See Son Qiang and Zhang Xiaobo, The China that Can Say No. See also M.C. Davis (ed.), Human Rights and Chinese Values. Legal, Philosophical and Political Perspectives, New York: Columbia University Press, 1995; W.T. de Bary and T. Weiming (eds), Confucianism and Human Rights, New York: Columbia University Press, 1998; F. Monceri, Altre globalizzazioni. Universalismo liberal e valori asiatici, Catanzaro: Rubbettino, 2002.

31. See: Shintaro Ishihara, The Japan that Can Say No; Mahathir Mohammed, The Asia that Can Say No; Son Qiang and Zhang Xiaobo The China that Can Say No. See also A. Ehr-Soon Tay, 'Asian values' and the rule of law, in P. Costa and D. Zolo (eds), The Rule of Law. History, Theory and Criticism, cit.

32. See L. Chung Sho, Human Rights in the Chinese Tradition, in UNESCO, Human Rights: Comments and Interpretations, New York: Columbia University Press, 1949.

33. Cf. L. Scillitani, "Tra l'Occidente e la Cina: una via antropologica ai diritti dell'uomo", in A. Catania and L. Lombardi Vallauri (eds), Concezioni del diritto e diritti umani. Confronti Oriente-Occidente, Napoli: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 2000, pp. 385-94.

34. Cf. F. Jullien, "Un usage philosophique de la Chine", Le débat, October 1996, p. 191; see also: R. Panikkar, "La notion des droits de l'homme est-elle un concept occidental?", Diogène, 120 (1982), pp. 87-115; W.T. de Bary, Asian Values and Human Rights. A Confucian Communitarian Perspective, Cambridge (Mass.): Harvard University Press, 1998; C. Taylor, "Conditions of an Unforced Consensus on Human Rights", in J.R. Bauer and D.A. Bell (eds), The East Asian Challenge for Human Rights, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999; D.A. Bell, East meets West: Human Rights and Democracy in East Asia, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000.

35. Cf. R. Panikkar, "La notion des droits de l'homme est-elle un concept occidental?", cit.; H. Höffe, "Déterminer le droits de l'homme à travers une discussion interculturelle", Revue de Métaphysique et de morale, (1997), 4; L. Baccelli, Il particolarismo dei diritti, cit., passim.

36. Ignatieff stresses the repressive function of the ad hoc International Criminal Tribunals; on the matter see my Invoking Humanity: War, Law and Global Order, London: Continuum International, 2002, pp. 99-132.

37. Cf. M. Ignatieff, Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry, cit., pp. 37-48.

38. Cf. M. Ignatieff, Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry, cit., p. 42.

39. Ibid., pp. 38-9.