The 'Long 1970s'

Human Rights, East-West Détente and Transnational Relations

Poul Villaume, Rasmus Mariager, Helle Porsdam

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317045601
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

Today it is widely recognised that the 'long 1970s' was a decisive international transition period during which traditional, collective-oriented socio-economic interest and welfare policies were increasingly replaced by the more individually and neo-liberally oriented value policies of the post-industrial epoch. Seen from a distance of three decades, it is increasingly clear that these socio-economic and socio-cultural processes also found their expression at the level of national and international political power. The contributors to this volume explore these processes of political-cultural realignment and their social impetus in Western Europe and the Euro-Atlantic area in and around the 1970s in the context of three agenda-setting topics of international history of this period: human rights, including the impact of decolonisation; East-West détente in Europe; and transnational relations and discourses. Going beyond the so-called Americanisation processes of the immediate postwar period, this volume reclaims Europe's place – and particularly that of smaller European nations – in contemporary Western history, demonstrating Europe's contribution to transatlantic transformation processes in political culture, discourse, and power during this period.

Part I

Human Rights

1 The Origins of the 1970s Global Human Rights Imagination

Mark Philip Bradley

10 December 1961. Actress Julie Christie and calypso singer Cy Grant are standing on the porch of St. Martin-in-the-Fields in central London to draw attention to the newly founded Amnesty International. On what is the thirteenth anniversary of the United Nations’ adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the two popular British celebrities are bound together by a cord. Joining them is Odette Churchill, a national heroine celebrated for working with the French resistance during World War II, withstanding Gestapo torture and enduring internment in the Nazi Ravensbrück concentration camp. At the very centre of St. Martin’s towering Corinthian columns looking out over Trafalgar Square, Odette Churchill lights the Amnesty candle, the flame of which slowly burns through the cord to liberate Christie and Grant. Appearing on the steps around them, a group of former political prisoners begin a vigil for those who Amnesty terms prisoners of conscience.¹

5 December 1965. At six o’clock in the evening a crowd gathers in Moscow’s Pushkin Square, just a mile from the Kremlin, to protest against the recent arrest of the writers Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel for the spread of anti-Soviet propaganda. Sinyavsky, a prominent member of the Union of Soviet Writers, began to write novellas depicting a menacing and surreal Stalinist state during the cultural thaw under Khrushchev. Although Daniel had a more muted public reputation before his arrest, he had also published several satirical novels about contemporary Soviet society. The protest is deliberately held on Soviet Constitution Day, the state holiday honouring what was known as the Stalin constitution of 1936, arguing that obedience to ‘Soviet legality’ legitimated the protest and required a public trial. A crowd of 250 protestors and approving bystanders carry banners that read ‘We demand an open trial for Sinyavsky and Daniel’ and ‘Respect the Soviet Constitution’. The KGB quickly disperses the crowd, confiscates the placards and detains some of the participants for questioning.²

15 March 1973. In São Paulo the General Assembly of the National Council of Brazilian Bishops commemorates the forthcoming 25th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by committing the church to ‘honor the exigencies of Human Rights vis-à-vis all those who collaborate with her’. With the military junta having taken power in 1964, the Catholic Church in Brazil is among the few institutions in civil society to speak out against the junta’s growing abuses of power. With the passage of draconian laws in 1968 that undid legal protections for civil and political rights and unleashed a reign of terror and rights abuses, the church itself became a victim of the junta’s repression. Many came to agree with the Archbishop of Fortaleza in northeastern Brazil who closed the city’s churches one Sunday after the arrest and imprisonment of a priest for a sermon critical of the regime. ‘If the Church were to remain silent when it witnesses the violation of human rights’, he said, ‘it would be a deplorable omission or a flagrant confession of its lack of confidence in Christ’. In March 1973 the Brazilian bishops go even further, calling for the establishment of ‘a world tribunal on Human Dignity, whose function would be to judge from an ethical point of view, the regimes which violate the basic rights of the human person’.³

In London, Moscow and São Paulo the universal languages of conscience, socialism, dignity, faith and human rights were becoming entangled.

The growing global engagement with human rights in the 1970s was initially scattered, episodic and improvisational. Amnesty International reported only 32,000 members worldwide in 1973. By 1980, however, the organization counted hundreds of thousands of members in 134 countries and a Nobel Peace Prize among its accomplishments. Beyond Amnesty, the number of international nongovernmental organizations working on human rights almost doubled over the decade. At the local level, the increase in numbers was even more dramatic. Hundreds of local groups around the globe took up the banner of human rights, increasingly enmeshed in a transnational network of advocacy and information politics. In one accounting, domestic groups founded in the 1970s that put human rights at the centre of their work numbered 220 in Latin America, 168 in Asia and the Pacific and 88 in Africa and the Middle East.⁴ Together they set the 1970s global human rights imagination in motion.

The surge of transnational non-state human rights politics was part of a broader explosion in global social mobilization. Human rights advocacy emerged simultaneously with new concerns about the environment, humanitarianism, global feminism and apartheid. Along with Amnesty, the formation of Friends of the Earth (1969), Greenpeace (1971) and Médecins sans frontières (MSF, 1971) set off this new non-state transnational advocacy. The establishment of the Anti-Apartheid Movement (1959) in Great Britain helped initiate what would become a growing global campaign against apartheid in South Africa. Major UN-sponsored international conferences on the environment (1972) and women (1975), both the first of their kind, intensified the growth and development of non-governmental organizations, in part because parallel if more decentralized meetings of activists variously termed ‘people’s forums’ or ‘people’s tribunals’ were organized alongside the official sessions. In aggregate numbers, international non-governmental organizations grew more than tenfold in number between 1960 and 1984, from 1,268 to 12,686, with the bulk of the growth in the 1970s. The increase in number of their local branches over the same period – from 24,136 to 79,786 – meant that the diffusion and thickening of non-state actors in the international system was even more dramatic.⁵

The novel presence of transnational human rights politics and global social mobilizations in the 1970s simultaneously reflected and contributed to a profound shift in world order. On one level, the state-based political and economic structures that had formed the Cold War international order after World War II began to come undone. But just as importantly, the rise of new affective bonds between the individual, the state and the world community, ones fashioned by the growing power and authority of moral witness in framing conceptions of suffering and injustice, started to reshape the kinds of political claims made in the international sphere. These transformations in world structure and affect deeply shaped the transnational politics of human rights. At the same time, human rights in the 1970s remained a protean concept. Rights talk in London, Moscow, São Paulo and elsewhere was not necessarily human rights talk. The turn to human rights in the 1970s across geographic space was neither ‘thin’ nor ‘thick’ nor was it ‘the last utopia’, as some historians have argued.⁶ Rather, human rights operated as a guest language that produced a variety of local vernaculars, one sometimes in tension with other competing moral and political visions. The human rights origins stories of the 1970s speak to the contingent, provisional and often contested formations of what human rights came to mean by the end of the decade. These circulations and plural vocabularies profoundly affected the making of the 1970s global human rights imagination.

Structural Transformations

The conditions of possibility that enabled the global social mobilizations of the 1970s were in part rooted in epochal changes in the very structures of political and economic world order as the 1960s came to a close. The intensification of borderless global capitalism, new patterns of international migration, the end of empire and the transnational diffusion of new technology and media all pushed against the nation-state based international order that had structured world politics since the end of the Second World War. They also opened up a global public sphere for non-state actors.

In most international histories of the 1970s, the decade is commonly rendered as another chapter in the history of the Cold War in which Soviet–American détente offered the primary lens for viewing world politics. But in fact while divisions between the Soviet Union and the US endured, the particularities of globalization in the 1970s forcefully shifted the dynamics of world politics. As the sociologist Saskia Sassen argues, the 1970s were a ‘tipping point’ that initiated the move ‘from an era marked by the nation-state and its capture of all major components of social, economic, political, and subjective life to one marked by a proliferation of orders’ in which new global economic, social and cultural flows de-centred the state in the making of international order.⁷ The historian Daniel Sargent traces how the rise of global finance capital in the 1970s began to upend prevailing statist economic planning and the public provision of social welfare that were among the central building blocks of the political order shaping the conditions of global political life after 1945. Offshore financial holdings leapt from 1.2 per cent of world GDP in 1964 to 16.2 per cent in 1980, with a tripling of world trade in the same period, in what marked the rapid growth of new forms of borderless capitalism and an individualistic market-oriented turn from the more collective and social ethos of state and world politics in the 1940s and 1950s. Empowering markets at the expense of government, 1970s globalization brought about significant erosion in the capacity of nation-states to manage their own economies and halted the continued construction of the postwar welfare state in its various American, European and Japanese iterations. Complex interdependence between a variety of state and non-state actors, rather than Cold War superpower politics, increasingly shaped the contours of the international system.⁸

State power in this new era of globalization did not so much disappear as begin to reinvent itself. In part, the state became an agent of what Sassen calls a prevailing ethos of ‘privatization, deregulation, and marketization’ in managing what had earlier been seen as public goods. But the state was also less and less a unitary actor on the world stage. Political scientist Anne-Marie Slaughter draws attention to what she terms the coming of the ‘disaggregated state’ in which its component parts – most particularly legislators, judges and regulatory agents – began to form cross-national horizontal networks and supranational vertical linkages around common concerns with trade and finance, the environment and human rights. This more fluid global order, Sassen and many others argue, opened up a wider space for ‘cross-border networks of activists engaged in specific localized struggles with an explicit or implicit global agenda’.⁹

The subjects at the centre of global social mobilization in the 1970s were shaped too by shifts in the movement of peoples, both changes in where migrants and refugees were coming from and where they were moving. The rise of an intensified cross-border labour market beginning in the 1970s accelerated the intensity and shifting patterns of international migration. This was especially important in the increase in contract labour migration to the Middle East in 1974, where the massive rise in oil price produced an unprecedented demand for workers in the oil-rich, though sparsely populated, states of the region. At the same time labour migration to Japan, Singapore and Taiwan also dramatically increased over the decade, as did the number of economic migrants from Mexico, Central America and Latin America to the US and Canada. The massive movements of economic migrants produced unease about labour rights and human trafficking, while the intensified levels of resource extraction in oil, minerals, fishing and timber that the work of these migrants facilitated heightened environmental anxieties about protection of land, water and the biosphere. As broader global migration flows began to shift from Western Europe, which had been the primary destination before the 1970s, to North America and Australia, their new presence in these regions would raise concerns about racial discrimination, the nature of citizenship and cultural rights.¹⁰

Patterns and numbers of refugees also shifted quite dramatically with the end of empire in 1970s. Here the decade served as another tipping point, bringing the era of de...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Acronyms and Abbreviations
• Introduction: The ‘Long 1970s’
• Part I Human Rights
• Part II East-West Détente
• Part III Transatlantic Relations and Discourses
• Bibliography
• Index