Human Rights: Too Vague to be Good Foreign Policy

It never fails to amaze me – powerful people saying strikingly obvious things, and having their voice resonate throughout the world. This is the case with one of Secretary Clinton’s latest statements. Apparently, “gay rights are human rights.” While we should strive to establish a universal understanding of how to humanely treat people, to use “human rights” as a foreign policy tool is an ambiguous, potentially subversive, and non-sustainable approach.

For starters, the concept of “human rights” is difficult to define. It is especially difficult to contextualize as a universal concept, if we consider the numerous social and political interpretations in Western history alone.

The idea of a “right” has roots in the political developments of the 16th century. And in many ways, is a product of the enlightenment. The problem — of course — is negotiating the universality of rights. Who gets them? Why should they? And, does the idea of “rights” serve as a spring board for social organization or a rhetorical tool to market, or even normalize the evolution of modern globalization?

During the Cold War, “human rights” were transformed into something slightly less abstract – the idea of “human rights” as a type of policy, most notably in the Carter administration.  This is what we are seeing now with the president’s address on “elevating the rights and treatment of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people abroad as a priority in U.S. foreign policy”.

Here is how it works:  You (other country) observe human rights, we (US) will continue a healthy diplomatic relationship – and here it comes – continue giving you aid.

So, what’s the problem? This is a good thing, right?

Well … theoretically.

Carter faced a problem: There is no way to properly establish an infrastructure to monitor the observance of human rights; you can’t really regulate it either. The result was Carter funding oppressive governments whose human rights violations were cleverly made invisible. There is just no way of the US really knowing.

Henry Kissinger was notorious for the “human rights” talk, using it as a tool to establish strong economic ties between Chile and the US during the Cold War. In his memos to then dictator Augusto Pinochet, his arguments are economically motivated.

Outside of ending violence towards the LGB ‘t’ community, do we have another goal? If so, what is it?

“Spreading” rights always has an economic component.  Whether the excuse for US intervention to bring down dictators, a community having the “right” to clean water or, what we see now, the LGB ‘t’ community becoming the negotiated commodity in an economic exchange, whose goal is solidify global dependency on the US, more than observing human rights because it is something we should do. There is an economic factor to all our international affairs. This is no exception.

I want the horrific abuse of LGB ‘t’ communities around the world to end. But I also want us to remain aware of the unresolved problems in trying to quantify “human rights” as a tool for negotiating foreign policy.

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