Human Rights

A Fragile Hegemony

THERE IS NO QUESTION TODAY about the global hegemony of human rights as a discourse of human dignity. Nonetheless, such hegemony faces a disturbing reality. A large majority of the world's inhabitants are not the subjects of human rights. They are rather the objects of human rights discourses. The question is, then, whether human rights are efficacious in helping the struggles of the excluded, the exploited, and the discriminated against, or whether, on the contrary, they make those struggles more difficult. In other words, is the hegemony claimed by human rights today the outcome of a historical victory, or rather of a historical defeat? Regardless of the answer, human rights are the hegemonic discourse of human dignity and thus insurmountable. This explains why oppressed social groups cannot help but ask the following questions: Even if human rights are part of the selfsame hegemony that consolidates and legitimates their oppression, could they be used to subvert it? Could human rights be used in a counterhegemonic way? If so, how? These questions lead to two others: Why is so much unjust human suffering not considered a violation of human rights? What other discourses of human dignity are there in the world, and to what extent are they compatible with human rights discourses?

The search for a counterhegemonic conception of human rights must start from a hermeneutics of suspicion regarding human rights as they are conventionally understood and sustained, that is to say, concerning the conceptions of human rights that are more closely related to their Western, liberal matrix. The hermeneutics of suspicion I propose is very much indebted to Ernst Bloch ([1947] 1995), who, for example, wonders about the reasons why, from the eighteenth century onward, the concept of utopia as an emancipatory political measure was gradually superseded and replaced by the concept of rights. Why was the concept of utopia less successful than the concept of law and rights as a discourse of social emancipation?

We must begin by acknowledging that law and rights have a double genealogy in Western modernity. On the one hand, an abyssal genealogy. I understand the dominant versions of Western modernity as having been constructed on the basis of an abyssal thinking that divided the world sharply between metropolitan and colonial societies (Santos, 2007a). This division was such that the realities and practices existing on the other side of the line, that is, in the colonies, could not possibly challenge the universality of the theories and practices in force on the metropolitan side of the line. As such, they were made invisible. As a discourse of emancipation, human rights were historically meant to prevail only on one side of the abyssal line, that is, in the metropolitan societies. It has been my contention that this abyssal line, which produces radical exclusions, far from being eliminated with the end of historical colonialism, continues to exist and that its exclusions are carried out by other means (neocolonialism, racism, xenophobia, and the permanent state of exception in dealing with alleged terrorists, undocumented migrant workers, and asylum seekers). International law and mainstream human rights doctrines have been used to guarantee such continuity. But, on the other hand, law and rights have a revolutionary genealogy on the metropolitan side of the line. Both the American Revolution and the French Revolution were fought in the name of law and rights. Bloch maintains that the superiority of the concept of law and rights has much to do with bourgeois individualism. The bourgeois society then emerging had already conquered economic hegemony and was fighting for political hegemony, soon to be consolidated by the American and French Revolutions. The concept of law and rights fitted perfectly the emergent bourgeois individualism inherent both to liberal theory and to capitalism. It is, therefore, easy to conclude that the hegemony enjoyed by human rights has very deep roots and that its trajectory has been a linear path toward the consecration of human rights as the ruling principle of a just society. This idea of a long-established consensus manifests itself in various ways, each one of them residing in an illusion. Because they are widely shared, such illusions constitute the common sense of conventional human rights. I distinguish four illusions: teleology, triumphalism, decontextualization, and monolithism.

The teleological illusion consists in reading history backwards, beginning with the consensus that exists today concerning the unconditional good human rights entail, and reading past history as a linear path inexorably leading toward such a result. The choice of precursors is crucial in this respect. As Samuel Moyn comments: "these are usable pasts: the construction of precursors after the fact" (2010: 12). Such an illusion prevents us from seeing that at any given historical moment different ideas concerning the nature of human dignity and social emancipation were in competition and that the victory of human rights is a contingent result that can be explained a posteriori, but which could not have been deterministically foreseen. The historical victory of human rights made it possible that the same actions—which according to other conceptions of human dignity would be considered actions of oppression and domination—were reconfigured as actions of emancipation and liberation when carried out in the name of human rights.

Related to the teleological illusion is the illusion of triumphalism, the notion that the victory of human rights is an unconditional human good. It takes for granted that all the other grammars of human dignity that have competed with that of human rights were inherently inferior in ethical and political terms. This Darwinian notion does not take into account a decisive feature of hegemonic Western modernity, indeed its true historical genius, namely, the way it has managed to supplement the force of the ideas that serve its purposes with the military force that, supposedly at the service of the ideas, is actually served by them. We need, therefore, to evaluate critically the grounds for the alleged ethical and political superiority of human rights. The ideals of national liberation—socialism, communism, revolution, nationalism—constituted alternative grammars of human dignity; at certain moments, they were even the dominant ones. Suffice it to say that the twentieth century's national liberation movements against colonialism, like the socialist and communist movements, did not invoke the human rights grammar to justify their causes and struggles. That the other grammars and discourses of emancipation have been defeated by human rights discourses should be considered inherently positive only if it could be demonstrated that human rights, while a...