Gary J. Bass: Why people who favor human rights often wantr to spread them around the world by force
Although Hunt's book is not really about the deliberate export of human rights, her examples are telling. The prime case is France in its wars after the Revolution. This meant the temporary abolition of torture in Switzerland and Spain, which fell apart after Napoleon was toppled, and the equally transient emancipation of Jews in small German and Italian states. The rights of man followed the French flag, in advance and in retreat. The few lasting successes--such as Jewish rights in Holland--were tainted by the entanglement of human rights with military aggression.
This old link between rights and troops reverberates to this day. The intentional spread of human rights has long been tarred as imperialism. Many times it is imperialism. But more often than is remembered, it is not. Once liberals have secured rights at home, there is a logic for not stopping there. Are not human rights by definition universal? Why not act universally and encourage the spread of human rights to all of humanity? In a pamphlet titled "Emancipate Your Colonies!" addressed to France in 1793, Bentham asked: "You choose your own government, why are not other people to choose theirs? Do you seriously mean to govern the world, and do you call that liberty? What is become of the rights of men? Are you the only men who have rights?"
One critical example is the slave trade. As Hunt relates, Napoleon Bonaparte brought slavery back to the French empire in 1802 and sent warships to brutally subdue rebellious blacks in the Caribbean colonies, failing only in Saint Domingue. But immediately after Waterloo, Britain demanded an end to France's slave trade. In July 1815, Lord Castlereagh, the conservative British foreign secretary, proudly informed his prime minister that the restored Bourbon monarchy had declared "the Slave Trade for ever abolished throughout the Dominions of France." (It would actually take until 1848 to put an end to the slave trade.) Bentham furiously told the president of Haiti that he would like to see Haitian ships "capturing the slave-trading ships" and then consigning the slavers "to the like slavery in your Island." The master of the slave ships, Bentham suggested, should be permanently branded as "a man so highly distinguished in barbarity" with "an indelible mark upon him"--such as cutting off "one of his lips."
In 1817, Britain turned its attentions to the Spanish empire, demanding an end to the slave trade, and also rattled its sabers against the slave trade in Cuba, Zanzibar, Iran, and Texas. This was anything but cheap talk. All told, as the political scientists Chaim Kaufmann and Robert Pape have reckoned, Britain lost something like five thousand troops in anti-slavery missions, soured its relations with America and France, and badly damaged its economy by undermining its own sugar industry. And as David Brion Davis has observed, in words that have an oddly familiar sound to debates today about the cost of spreading human rights, "Britain's fixation on the slave trade often worked against British interests, damaging or straining relations with Mus- lim leaders in an era of Islamic insurgency and nationalistic discontent." Here Britain hurt its own empire for the sake of humanity....
Read entire article at Gary Bass in the New Republic in review of Lynn Hunt's new book, Inventing Human Rights: A History (Norton)
This old link between rights and troops reverberates to this day. The intentional spread of human rights has long been tarred as imperialism. Many times it is imperialism. But more often than is remembered, it is not. Once liberals have secured rights at home, there is a logic for not stopping there. Are not human rights by definition universal? Why not act universally and encourage the spread of human rights to all of humanity? In a pamphlet titled "Emancipate Your Colonies!" addressed to France in 1793, Bentham asked: "You choose your own government, why are not other people to choose theirs? Do you seriously mean to govern the world, and do you call that liberty? What is become of the rights of men? Are you the only men who have rights?"
One critical example is the slave trade. As Hunt relates, Napoleon Bonaparte brought slavery back to the French empire in 1802 and sent warships to brutally subdue rebellious blacks in the Caribbean colonies, failing only in Saint Domingue. But immediately after Waterloo, Britain demanded an end to France's slave trade. In July 1815, Lord Castlereagh, the conservative British foreign secretary, proudly informed his prime minister that the restored Bourbon monarchy had declared "the Slave Trade for ever abolished throughout the Dominions of France." (It would actually take until 1848 to put an end to the slave trade.) Bentham furiously told the president of Haiti that he would like to see Haitian ships "capturing the slave-trading ships" and then consigning the slavers "to the like slavery in your Island." The master of the slave ships, Bentham suggested, should be permanently branded as "a man so highly distinguished in barbarity" with "an indelible mark upon him"--such as cutting off "one of his lips."
In 1817, Britain turned its attentions to the Spanish empire, demanding an end to the slave trade, and also rattled its sabers against the slave trade in Cuba, Zanzibar, Iran, and Texas. This was anything but cheap talk. All told, as the political scientists Chaim Kaufmann and Robert Pape have reckoned, Britain lost something like five thousand troops in anti-slavery missions, soured its relations with America and France, and badly damaged its economy by undermining its own sugar industry. And as David Brion Davis has observed, in words that have an oddly familiar sound to debates today about the cost of spreading human rights, "Britain's fixation on the slave trade often worked against British interests, damaging or straining relations with Mus- lim leaders in an era of Islamic insurgency and nationalistic discontent." Here Britain hurt its own empire for the sake of humanity....