A precarious equilibrium

Human rights and détente in Jimmy Carter's Soviet policy

Umberto Tulli

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781526146014
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Human rights and détente inextricably intertwined during Carter's years. By promoting human rights in the USSR, Carter sought to build a domestic consensus for détente; through bipolar dialogue, he tried to advance human rights in the USSR. But, human rights contributed to the erosion of détente without achieving a lasting domestic consensus.

1

Setting the stage for a human rights policy

During the 1970s, human rights gained unexpected and sudden prominence in international politics. Discussions of human rights were everywhere, providing a vocabulary to oppressed religious groups, national minorities and political dissidents, as well as workers’ or women’s groups. However different these claims were, they all converged on making human rights the central concern of the decade. As popular as the concept was, it was also a contested one.

For many activists around the world, human rights offered a tool to transcend political divisions on behalf of a universal idea and what historian Samuel Moyn labelled an apolitical “last utopia” to transform international relations.¹ To governments and movements from the “global South”, human rights language meant above all self-determination and the rejection of neo-colonial practices.² Socialist countries offered their own version of human rights, one that was based on their egalitarian ideology and on the need to respond to international criticism of their abuses of individual freedom.³ Western European governments’ discourse on human rights was based on their post-1945 experiences and on their ambitious political will to prove that the European Economic Community was a global “civilian power”. In a broad definition of human rights, Western Europeans began referring to political freedoms, social and economic rights, the right to development and a vague notion of “third generation rights”.⁴

Nowhere was the debate on human rights more intense than in the United States. The reasons for the emergence of human rights within the United States were multiple and diverse. Many activists were galvanized by broader changes occurring both at the national and at the international level since the 1960s, such as decolonization, the achievements of the civil rights movement, as well as President Johnson’s “war on poverty”. Involvement with the many movements from the “long 1960s” provided activists with experiences, sensitivity to rights violations and a jargon for advocating a rights-based political proposal.⁵ Grassroots activism, however, had to struggle to make its way through the legislative and the political process. In this sense, historians Samuel Moyn and Barbara Keys are probably right in pointing out a political discontinuity between the civil rights movement’s experience of the 1960s and the human rights surge of the 1970s. The Vietnam War and its legacies provided this discontinuity. The war was not an “incubator” of human rights ideas. Nevertheless, it produced three major changes that contributed to the prominence of human rights in American foreign policy during the 1970s.⁶ First, to many Americans, the Vietnam War proved the moral bankruptcy and imperialist bias of their country’s foreign policy.⁷ The war opened the Pandora’s box of American Cold War alliances with authoritarian regimes and of the USA’s responsibility in human rights violations around the world. To many Americans, the war generated “a deep sense of shame and embarrassment, feelings of guilt that cried for expiation”. Prioritizing the promotion of human rights abroad could favour such an expiation.⁸ Second, the war accelerated the collapse of Cold War liberalism, that consensual doctrine that had sustained America’s Cold War policies both at home and abroad for about twenty years. New principles for American foreign policy had to be found. Human rights could offer a new consensual doctrine, one that fitted well with the American tradition; one that could bring morality, legalism and idealism all together in inspiring Washington’s action abroad.⁹ Finally, the war fuelled the political and institutional ambitions of a resurgent Congress that found in the promotion of human rights an arena to affirm its role and to challenge the White House handling of foreign affairs.¹⁰

However, for those members of Congress who elevated human rights to a high priority, the issue intertwined with their own beliefs and ideological preferences. Accordingly, as popular as the concept of human rights was in Congress, it was also divisive and ambiguous. Attention to human rights soon proved to be double-edged and contradictory, with two opposing understandings of the concept’s political meaning for American foreign policy.

From neglect to denial: the United States and human rights, 1948–1972

It is tempting to read the history of American foreign policy as driven by the promotion of rights, democracy and freedom. Yet, human rights entered American foreign policy as a marginal aside during the Second World War in planning for the post-war order. In preparing for America’s entry into the war, President Franklin D. Roosevelt announced his “four essential freedoms” to rebuild the international system: “the freedom of speech and expression”, the freedom to “worship God”, the “freedom from want” and, finally, “freedom from fear”.¹¹

Roosevelt’s manifesto was a list of both the essential rights Nazi fascism had violated and the basic principles to rebuild and remodel the international community. It defined a new conception of liberty, which combined into a single category civil and political rights, economic and social rights and people’s right to self-determination.¹² The “Four Freedoms” speech was also a human rights manifesto that asserted a substantial equation between freedom and human rights. In concluding his address, Roosevelt remarked that “freedom means the supremacy of human rights everywhere” and that “our support goes to those who struggle to gain those rights or to keep them”.¹³

Roosevelt’s speech fuelled a variety of debates among many organizations, such as the International League for Human Rights, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the American Jewish Committee. It inspired dozens of books, pamphlets and articles, as well as a series of four paintings by illustrator Norman Rockwell. It became a sort of ideological blueprint for what historian Mark Philip Bradley identified as the “human rights moment of the ’40s” and for the definition of many human rights treaties, declarations and covenants, such as the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), the Nuremberg Principles (1946), the American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man (1948), the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide (1948), the Fourth Geneva Convention on the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War (1949) and the European Convention on Human Rights (1950).¹⁴

The United Nations Declaration on Human Rights was the capstone of this panoply of international documents. Yet, it also revealed the limits of the human rights discourse of the 1940s. Many of these had already emerged during early negotiations of the new international system. The final communiqué of the 1944 Dumbarton Oaks Conference for the creation of the United Nations, for example, mentioned human rights only in a brief paragraph, fuelling international protests. Within the United States, for example, Jacob Blaustein and Joseph Proskauer, both members of the American Jewish Committee, started a petition for the adoption of an International Charter for Human Rights. Similarly, Frederick Nolde, executive secretary of the Joint Committee on Religious Liberty, prepared three memoranda for Secretary of State Edward Stettinius urging the creation of an international mechanism to implement Roosevelt’s “Four Freedoms”.¹⁵ Abroad, on the eve of the 1945 San Francisco conference where the United Nations was officially established, some international allies of the United States urged the introduction of an international system for the protection of human rights. To address their demands, Stettinius responded that the idea was not feasible at that moment and that the only viable solution was to wait for the establishment of a specific committee that would write an international covenant on human rights.¹⁶

This committee was announced to the world on 26 June 1946, when the UN Economic and Social Council inaugurated its Commission on Human Rights, whose main task was to draw up what would later become the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Originally, the Commission was supposed to define a binding text. However, its mandate was immediately curtailed. Contrary to original plans, members of the Commission would not be independent experts, but rather political representatives of states. Its members further contributed to the reduction of their mandate when they decided to disavow the right of the individual to petition the Commission. Denunciations of human rights abuses would be channelled through states and governments. Moreover, the UN debate over the adoption of a binding covenant to protect human rights that incorporated socio-economic rights encountered firm opposition from American conservative politicians and intellectuals as well as professional organizations and lobbies, such as the American Medical Association. Domestic opposition intertwined with the Cold War and growing international confrontation. The fundamental document became a far-reaching declaration that was supposed to be integrated by other more specific treaties. However, the American delegation at the Commission on Human Rights was instructed to keep socio-economic rights out of the covenant while appearing non-hostile on these rights. A non-cooperative attitude would have created a geopolitical disadvantage for the United States because many states supported a strong commitment on socio-economic rights. Thus, the American diplomatic strategy became one of defining an international covenant that “mirrored the principles and rights” protected by the US Constitution and proposing further covenants or “other measures concerning economic, social, and cultural rights”.¹⁷ In February 1952 the General Assembly authorized the two-covenant solution. The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights supplemented the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but both were adopted only in 1966.

The ideological reconceptualization of human rights produced by the Cold War had relevant consequences. Within the United States, many began perceiving social and economic rights, one of Roosevelt’s “Four Freedoms”, as ancillary to individual freedoms. It was a clearly self-serving understanding, with a patently anti-Soviet and anti-communist bias. Nevertheless, it was also deeply rooted in the historical evolution of human rights – civil and political rights came first, then economic and social rights – and in their own nature: unlike individual freedoms, economic and social rights required state intervention that could not be universally ensured soon after the war. On their side, the Soviets overturned such concepts to point out that material equality was a prerequisite for assuring fundamental freedoms and that economic and social rights were modern and intrinsically superior rights. The confrontation between civil and political rights and economic and social rights became a continuous leitmotiv in mutual accusations between the United States and the Soviet Union. The UN Commission on Human Rights became a battlefield for ideological confrontation between East and West.¹⁸

The new meaning the United States attributed to human rights became clear with the “Tru...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Author’s note
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Setting the stage for a human rights policy
• 2 Human rights and the 1976 presidential election
• 3 Firmness abroad, consensus at home, 1977–1978
• 4 Coping with critics: the choice in favour of quiet diplomacy, 1978
• 5 Critics’ triumph: quiet diplomacy, SALT II and the invasion of Afghanistan, 1979–1980
• Conclusion
• Select bibliography
• Index