The notion of human rights, even when more honored in the breach than in practice, is now an established part of the architecture of the international order. Since its conception in 1948, in the wake of a devastating world war and at the beginning of an era marked by optimism about the prospects of “development” for a world undergoing reconstruction and with decolonization in rapid progress globally, the foundational document—the Universal Declaration of Human Rights —has undergone both challenges and extensions. The former largely relate to the question of the genuine universality of the Declaration, one drafted at a time when the newly created United Nations Organization had few members, and which, as subsequent debate has noted, embodied essentially Western philosophical concepts about such issues as the rights of individuals in relation to the rights of communities, and as such did not fully represent or reflect cultural diversity and the sources from which notions of rights have often emerged, such as religions. The latter relate both to the silences of the originating document—in particular questions of cultural and economic rights, and to issues that have emerged in the rapidly transforming world since the late 1940s in which a huge range of issues unsuspected at the time have emerged. These include questions of new technology, medical ethics, trade, nuclear power, environment, new categories of refugees , access to and exploitation of space, the seas and unpopulated areas such as Antarctica, potentially rich in mineral resources , the rights of children, protection of minorities and even such issues quite beyond the scope of any declaration of purely human rights, such as the rights (if such there be) of animals and of the biosphere in general.
The context of the Declaration is significant here—the hope not only to avoid the repeated trauma of future wars which, with the advent of nuclear weapons, could only be immensely more devastating that the one just terminated, but that, with colonization ending, initiatives such as the Marshall Plan working successfully to rebuild a war-shattered Europe, the economic crises of the Great Depression now receding into the past, and with new technologies available (many paradoxically developed during the pressures of the war) that could be turned to socially productive ends, a new era of peace and development was dawning. Indeed, the very notion of “development” as a purposeful and directed policy of interventions, particularly in the “Third World” (largely the former colonies and those just emerging from colonial rule), aimed at the eradication of poverty, the promotion of (Western style) democracy and a push toward industrialization and “modernization” (of health systems, education, courts and so forth), is seen as emerging precisely at this time. Of course perceptive critics soon arose to argue (and still do—see Sachs 1995) that the whole project of development was simply a disguised form of Westernization, and to a great extent a political rather than a humanitarian project (especially as the Cold War got underway), and even that it represented colonialism by another name. As the notion of globalization has become a framing concept for the current planet-wide processes of integration (in the interests of some), much the same critique has been extended to that too, to the extent that in the view of many on what remains of the traditional Left, neo-liberal capitalism, globalization and development are more or less synonyms. Be that as it may, it is important to note the original coincidence of the idea of universal human rights and the idea of development, at least as it was conceived in the 1940s and 1950s. This is an idea that, while it has never been totally lost, is no longer a dominant trope in development discourse.
The original declaration has undergone many extensions, embodied in such instruments as the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (both approved by the UN General Assembly in 1966), and specific declarations of the rights of children, of refugees , of minorities, indigenous peoples and other vulnerable groups emanating from International Labor Organization (ILO) and very much from UNESCO which has a long history of passing such declarations, up to an including the major Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions in 2005 (for an extended discussion of this latter document see De Beukelaer et al. 2015). Significant among these has been the recognition that human rights encompass and imply cultural rights , yet while this is true, the notion of such rights and what they may in turn encompass, is still underdeveloped. In the pages that follow several issues relating to this will be addressed: the meaning of the term “cultural rights ”, its connection to other forms of rights, its concrete expression in a variety of cultural manifestations and very centrally, the links between cultural rights and what here and elsewhere (Clammer 2012) I have called “holistic development”—forms of development that far exceed the purely economic or material and involve the development of culture, the pursuit of social and cultural justice, concern for the environment as the essential context for the maintenance and flourishing of both human and non-human life forms and ideas of both material and cultural sustainability and the links between all of these. The very notion of “rights” implies an ethical discourse, and this aspect of discussion of rights needs to be drawn out and strengthened, and linked to a range of significant debates—in the somewhat underdeveloped field of development ethics, to the rapidly emerging field of environmental ethics, to the rights (including cultural rights ) of refugees , migrants and minorities, to gender, and to the uncomfortable but essential debate of the quality of culture, and whether a debate can be initiated about the destructive, trivializing and negative aspects of much of our contemporary culture, as well as to its constructive and socially positive dimensions.
If one jumps ahead from history to the present moment, it is evident that the sources of most of our current planetary crisis (conflict, climate change , resource depletion, pollution, loss of biodiversity and so forth) are traceable directly to our cultural habits—over consumption, addiction to the car, the plane and the long-distance transportation of commodities, a throwaway habit, lack of recycling, addiction to novelty in fashion, furnishings and housing and cradle-to-grave design, rather than cradle-to-cradle. Both lack of sustainability and the difficulties of making a transition to a sustainable society are cultural, not natural (Clammer 2016), and if this is the case, then solutions must lay in changes of cultural values (including in the largely socially produced structure of our desires) and behavior. But this is where the question of cultural rights becomes complex. Let us start with a working definition: that cultural rights are the right to a culture, to cultural expression, to the free development of that culture from which one derives one’s primary identity and to the right to defend that culture against its destruction or erosion. In a sense, of course, everyone “has” a culture: it is part of the definition of being human. The problem is the negation or diminution of the forms of cultural expression (foods, language, dress, religion, housing styles, music, literature, dance , livelihoods) from which one derives a sense of identity and allows one to say with confidence that “I am an x”. Cultures can be threatened politically, by globalization and the homogenization that it so often produces, by colonization, and even by technological advances such as the Internet, where most of the content is in a very limited range of “major” metropolitan languages, and especially English. Loss of cultural diversity (often signaled by the disappearance of languages) is in many ways parallel to the loss of biodiversity, and indeed is implicated in it in so far as many indigenous languages embody a huge amount of ecological knowledge, which is lost with the vanishing of any one of those languages from the total repertoire of the world’s linguistic heritage. The right to possess a culture and the dignity that it confers (including an identity and a history) is thus a fundamental human right, the loss of which not only diminishes the variety and complexity of the world, but potentially endangers our future as a species, as vital and hard-won knowledge is destroyed or denigrated and as ways of life and forms of experience are pushed into extinction.
Cultural Diversity and Cultural Rights
International bodies concerned with culture, and in particular UNESCO , have devoted considerable attention to some of these issues, including the dangers of the loss of cultural diversity and the need to protect local cultures from erosion, particularly by the forces of globalization . Such major instruments include the UNESCO Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions (2005) mentioned above, and the 2001 Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity , which opens with the words “Committed to the full implementation of the human rights and fundamental freedoms proclaimed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights ” and continues in its preamble with the statement that “culture is at the heart of contemporary debates about identity, social cohesion, and the development of a knowledge-based economy”.
But when the rather fuzzy UNESCO concept of culture used in these various declarations is broken down, it turns out to have very many dimensions, any one of which raises interesting questions about the application of an idea of cultural rights . Biopiracy—the utilization without consent of natural products long used by native peoples, and the conversion of them into profit-making products (typically pharmaceuticals) and attempting to patent them without payment of royalties—is a well-known and now well contested issue, one that sometimes overlaps with genetic manipulation and similar practices that involve both interference with natural processes and exploitation of local knowledge. Less acknowledged is the issue of intellectual and creative property rights. Where such knowledge is protected by formal patents or by agreements enforced by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), few problems arise. But where such knowledge is truly local and there is little or no awareness of or access to intellectual property protection, cultural piracy is easy. An important aspect of this relates to creative products such as music, crafts or theatre. When is it appropriate to “borrow” from another artistic tradition (as has indeed frequently happened in Western art, with for example the “discovery” in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries of Japanese art and of “primitive” art), and when does this become cultural appropriation? The hybrid nature of so much culture in the current globalized world situation makes this a difficult question to answer when Hollywood penetrates almost everywhere, where Japanese manga and anime are consumed all over the planet, where Singaporean teenagers listen to both British and Taiwanese pop music, where the shelves of Japanese video rental stores are filled with Korean soap operas and where McDonalds and Starbucks seem to appear wherever one travels, and most of us wear local Western fashions that have now become the global norm. Deliberate hybridization is now often typical of theatre in and beyond Asia, a phenomenon that greatly worries some critics such as the Indian writer and director Rustom Bharucha who sees the adoption of stories, styles and themes from South Asian classics by Western theatre directors as appropriation and hence as a kind of intellectual colonialism (Bharucha 1993).
These kinds of questions can be extended to a range of issues such as open source publishing (should all knowledge, especially that funded out of the public purse, such as in universities, be accessible to all without cost, or would this diminish the interest of scholars and researchers in carrying out original work? What are the limits (including the time limits) of copyright? Is censorship ever acceptable (especially when politically motivated) or does it, at least in some cases, protect the vulnerable (e.g. children) from exposure to harmful material? Can such an argument be extended to the arts? (Young 2005). Who, if anyone, is responsible for identifying and then protecting “heritage” or is such “heritage” simply old stuff, probably originally associated with a now discredited aristocracy (“stately homes”)? Can much the same be said of “classical” music, “Old Master” paintings and most of the material to be found in museums and non-contemporary art galleries? (Anheier and Isar 2011; Hobsbawm 2014). It is easy to see why culture is rightly considered to be a site of struggle. Quite harmless seeming questions turn out to be loaded with controversy. Furthermore, the context in which such questions are raised is changing rapidly around us. Globalization and transnationalism have produced new and ever more volatile forms of hybridity, culture contact, points of conflict and points of sharing, especially as the media becomes less and less bound by the old national boundaries. Unprecedented numbers of people are on the move for a large variety of reasons—as refugees , tourists, professionals, business people, workers with NGOs and international organizations. Whether or not we have reached the point of “peak oil”, a post-oil future is surely not far away and yet very little is being done politically, economically or culturally to prepare for it (Urry 2013). The Indian novelist and one—time anthropologist Amitav Ghosh has suggested in a significant recent book that climate change touches upon culture in at least three ways—as itself a culturally driven phenomenon, as a world-changin...