US: Human rights and realpolitik

Many Americans want to rehabilitate their country's tarnished human rights image; but can foreign policy escape the harsh realities of international politics? Peter Buxbaum writes for ISN Security Watch.

Progressives in the US are bemoaning their country's besmirched human rights image of the last few years.

They blame the Bush administration, of course, pointing to atrocities such as Abu Ghraib and the absence of constitutional rights for Guantanamo detainees as examples of human rights abuses by the US government. These circumstances have damaged the credibility of the US to advocate for human rights elsewhere.

"It is not the Statue of Liberty anymore that people associate with the United States," said John Podesta, president of the Center for American Progress, a liberal, Washington-based think tank, at a human rights conference held last week at Georgetown University in Washington. "It is the black hole of Guantanamo and the picture of an Iraqi standing on a box with electrodes attached to him at Abu Ghraib."

Many Americans like to think that human rights have long been a bipartisan feature of US foreign policy. They point to Franklin Roosevelt's declaration of the Four Freedoms, Harry Truman's support for the United Nations, and Ronald Reagan's meetings with Soviet dissidents as examples.

Even President George W Bush is part of this tradition, for some. After all, one of his several rationalizations for the war in Iraq was to plant the seeds of democracy in the Arab Middle East, albeit through the barrel of a gun.

But with all three remaining US presidential candidates saying they eschew torture and all three advocating the closing of the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, there is reason to believe that the next American administration will incorporate some changes to its human rights policies.

The question is whether it will make a difference on the ground. There has long been a strong pull in US foreign policy toward acting on realpolitik, idealized human rights pronouncements notwithstanding. "What we view as our strategic security interests and economic interests generally win out," James Sasser, the former US ambassador to Beijing, said during the conference.

"Some see human rights as propaganda to help one group of countries undermine the position of others," allowed Madeleine Albright, the former US Secretary of State, without necessarily endorsing that view.

"Foreign policy just means getting another country to do what you want," she added.

A tool of realpolitik

Perhaps the better way to look at it is that the US uses human rights policy as a tool of realpolitik. But that does not mean that a more honest and invigorated human rights policy will not do any good in the world.

Conference participants suggested several ways the US could reorient its foreign policy on human rights. First and foremost would be to get its own house in order by abiding by the international norms it claims to support.

Another step would be to de-emphasize free elections as the single pillar of democracy and place greater stress on economic equity and justice. And finally, the US could more effectively advance human rights, they said, by partnering with other global players, most notably the EU.

"There has been a false construct in our country for some time between security and human rights," said John Shattuck, a former Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor.

In other words, the Bush administration has used the international security situation to erode the US practice of human rights, as evidenced by its policy of rendition, its questionable interrogation practices and its attempted abrogation of the right of habeas corpus for many security detainees.

The Bush domestic human rights record has also been problematic. The administration insisted that Congress pass laws allowing the federal government to snoop into US citizens' financial records, with the promise that these enhanced powers would be used only to advance security.

"The top agenda item for the next administration should be to end the paradoxical situation in which the US has unparalleled economic and military power but has the lowest standing in the world as far as human rights," said Shattuck.

He cited a 2007 BBC survey, in which two-thirds of the respondents in 19 countries saw the US as a violator of human rights; only 29 percent of those surveyed had a favorable view of the US.

"This has led to a drastic loss of soft power," Shattuck added, meaning "the ability to advance a human rights agenda through means other than coercion. If we want to issue an annual human rights report on other countries, as we do, we had better make sure our own behavior on interrogation and detention is in compliance with our own views on these subjects."

'Freedom' vs human rights

Conference participants also saw the current administration's emphasis on "freedom" at the expense of other elements of democracy as an obstacle to communicating a human rights message internationally, and especially in the developing world. President Bush never ceases to repeat the fact that millions of Iraqis participated in free elections, while ignoring that country's collapsed economy and civil chaos.

"We are always talking freedom," said Sasser. "It is an old saw that goes back to before the Cold War. There is little resonance for that now. We ought to be talking justice and equity, and less about freedom."

In other words, establishing a sustainable economy and a reasonable expectation of basic personal security are also important human rights concerns in many countries, concerns that are not addressed by current US policy.

"This administration's emphasis of freedom over justice is a correctable error," added Steve Coll, president and CEO of the New America Foundation, a Washington-based research organization.

"The freedom message is often not effective in troubled societies. Justice is more important than choice. The United States has not yet developed the international language to communicate these concepts. The next American president can find the language to do so."

Part of the problem, for Albright, is that US human rights rhetoric has not caught up with international reality.

"The Cold War debate raged against the backdrop of the struggle between communism and capitalism," she said. "Now we must contend with globalization and a government model that combines economic reform with governmental repression."

The latter reference, to China, involves a model Albright dubbed "market Leninism," which seeks to benefit from the global economy without jeopardizing the position of the existing power elite. "We must prove that human rights leads not only to the voting booth but to food on the table," she said. "Voting and eating are not opposing concepts."

Albright said she was not discouraged by the electoral successes of Islamist elements in places like Iraq, Egypt and the Palestinian Authority. "I don't share the conclusion that this should cause us to refrain from encouraging elections in certain part of the world," she said. "Everyone running in a free election has the obligation to renounce violence and to follow constitutional procedures.

"Democracy is not instant coffee," she added, "but a slow-brewing process in which fair elections are one stage that also includes an independent judiciary, a free press, political parties and the right of civil society of organize."

Conference participants also urged US policymakers to recognize that the struggle for human rights has become internationalized; it can no longer be dominated by one country.

"Democratization and the rhetoric of human rights are no longer seen as American," said Coll. "They are seen as southern in the north-south context.

"Human rights have become much more important to other governments around the world," acknowledged Sasser. "The United States was the great champion of human rights in the 20th century. One of my great regrets is our loss of credibility in this area in the 21st. The European Union appears to have taken the lead in this area in the past few years.

"I'd like to see the United States, the European Union, Japan, and others with a sense of human rights banding together and pressing forward with this agenda."

Does all this mean that the US will abandon realpolitik and advocate for human rights around the world regardless of the political consequences? Probably not.

But a reoriented US human rights policy - emphasizing the full basket of rights which advance the position of people on the ground and with the influence and perspective of international partners - could help the US avoid some of the mistakes of the past and do more good in the world, no matter what its motives.

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