BERLIN – Two centuries ago the American and French Revolutions brought forth the natural law concept of inalienable human rights. However, it took nearly two centuries of wars, political and social disasters, and decolonization before this idea became globally accepted, at least in theory.
In the beginning, the idea of human rights was limited to domestic politics. In international relations, power, not right, continued to be the only thing that mattered: the traditional concept of state sovereignty focused exclusively on power, i.e., on control over people and territory, and protected the state’s authority, regardless of whether its enforcement was civilized or brutal, democratic or authoritarian.
The Nuremberg Trials of the German war criminals after World War II marked the first important change in the world’s understanding of the concept of sovereignty. For the first time, an entire state leadership was put on trial for its crimes, as its representatives and henchmen were brought to justice.
The Nuremberg Trials and, in parallel, the creation of the United Nations and its Universal Declaration of Human Rights, signalled the growing importance of law in international relations. Sovereignty was no longer based solely on power, but increasingly on law and respect for the rights of citizens.
This process was largely frozen during the five decades of the Cold War. But human rights and the rule of law began to re-emerge as a theme of Western policy, especially in the wake of the Helsinki Conference on European Security and Cooperation and its use by the administration of US President Jimmy Carter, as well as by numerous non-governmental advocates protesting the treatment of Soviet dissidents.
The next big step was the emergence of the concept of humanitarian intervention after the genocide in Rwanda and the Balkan wars in the 1990’s. As a result, international law came to recognize the “right of protection” against governmental arbitrariness and states’ crimes against their own people, even though enforcement remains quite uncertain.
Finally, the same developments in politics and international law led to the creation of the International Court of Justice. With its establishment, resulting from long and terrible experience, the basic idea of modernity – that the power of states and their rulers should be subject to the rule of higher law, thus placing individual rights above state sovereignty – has taken a great step forward.
This development was anything but accidental. In the face of the totalitarian challenges of fascism and communism in the twentieth century, Europe and the United States have become aware that the rule of law, separation of powers, and democracy decisively determine foreign policy and matter greatly from the point of view of international security. Democracies have proved to be much more peaceful than authoritarian regimes and dictatorships.
But the progress achieved so far is again under threat. China’s rise and Russia’s resurgence suggest that there is no necessary link between economic development, on the one hand, and political and cultural modernization, on the other. In particular, China’s breathtaking economic success seems to point to the existence of viable authoritarian alternatives to the Western idea that freedom, democracy, the rule of law, and the market economy are bound together. Indeed, China appears to suggest that selective modernization is possible (modernization
