Mutual Respect? Ethical Foreign Policy in a Multicultural World
International Studies Association
March 17-21, 1998
ABSTRACT
The Mission Statement for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office promulgated by the new Government in Britain defines 'mutual respect' as one of the benefits to be promoted by that Mission, claiming that 'we will put human rights at the heart of our foreign policy' and pursue an ethical foreign policy. The first part of this paper will examine in general terms what an ethical foreign policy might look like, arguing that the notion is unsatisfactory for a number of reasons, most particularly in so far as it either rests on a false opposition, between the ethical and the non-ethical, or asks of 'foreign policy' something that foreign policy cannot, by its nature, provide. The second part focuses more narrowly on human rights, arguing that while 'mutual respect' is indeed a worthy goal it is by no means clear that the account of what mutual respect might mean presented by the Mission Statement and by the Foreign Secretary in his speeches on the subject can survive critical scrutiny.
On 1 May 1997 a Labour Government was returned to power in Britain after eighteen years in opposition. None of the team of ministers who were appointed to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) by Prime Minister Tony Blair had had any prior experience of government office - indeed only the new Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook MP, had been in Parliament when Labour had last held power. In the 1970s and early 1980s, Cook had been a critic of the underlying assumptions of British foreign policy shared by the Wilson, Callaghan and Thatcher administrations - assumptions such as the supreme importance of Britain's relationship with the United States and the value of British membership of the European Community - and although these criticisms, shared at the time by the new Prime Minister, had been had been more or less silenced by the emergence of 'New Labour', Cook was widely regarded as the most influential left-winger in the new government. In the circumstances, there seemed good reason to expect at least some changes in the content of British foreign policy and in the foreign policy-making process.
One almost immediate symbol of change was the unveiling, with an uncharacteristic display of showmanship, of a Mission Statement for the FCO - the Office having previously somehow managed to survive without this indispensable tool of modern management (FCO, 1997a). Beneath pictures of British soldiers on UN peacekeeping duties, an aircraft engine rather optimistically symbolising British exports, Tony Blair meeting Nelson Mandela, and a middle-aged male scientist instructing a young, female and attractive Asian counterpart - the image-makers having strayed here onto dangerous ground - the actual text of the Mission Statement was, for the most part, conventional.. The summary Mission Statement reads 'The Mission of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office is to promote the national interests of the United Kingdom and contribute to a a strong international community'. The statement goes on 'We shall pursue that Mission to secure for Britain four benefits through our foreign policy', the four benefits being security, prosperity, the quality of life and
Mutual Respect We shall work though our international forums and bilateral relationships to spread the values of human rights, civil liberties and democracy which we demand for ourselves.
This latter statement was reinforced by Mr. Cook in his speech at the press launch of the Statement :
The Labour Government does not accept that political values can be left behind when we check in our passports to travel on diplomatic business. Our foreign policy must have an ethical dimension and must support the demands of other peoples for the democratic rights on which we insist for ourselves. We will put human rights at the heart of our foreign policy. (FCO, 1997b)
This commitment, elaborated by the Foreign Secretary in a keynote speech of 17 July 1997 (FCO, 1997c), lies behind the claim that Britain is pursuing what it has become customary for the media to refer to as an 'ethical foreign policy'.
The first part of this paper will examine in general terms what an ethical foreign policy might look like, arguing that the notion is unsatisfactory for a number of reasons, most particularly in so far as it either rests on a false opposition, between the ethical and the non-ethical, or asks of 'foreign policy' something that foreign policy cannot, by its nature, provide. The second part focuses more narrowly on human rights, arguing that while 'mutual respect' is indeed a worthy goal it is by no means clear that the account of what mutual respect might mean presented by the Mission Statement and by Mr. Cook in his speeches on the subject can survive critical scrutiny.
An Ethical Foreign Policy?
When we describe someone's behaviour as 'ethical', we are generally attempting to convey the idea that they are behaving in accordance with some kind of moral principle, that they are acting for reasons which go beyond pure self-interest - although we do not generally require complete self-abnegation in order to award this designator. What constitutes a moral principle is, of course, a matter of dispute (Warnock, 1967; Norman, 1983). 'Consequentialists' judge conduct in terms of outcomes - most famously, utilitarians regard as ethical behaviour that maximises happiness; 'deontologists' are rule-oriented - most famously, Kantians regard as ethical behaviour that follows maxims generated by the categorical imperative, that is maxims that can be willed as universal and do not treat other people solely as means. Hegelians and neo-Hegelians draw a distinction between ethics ('sittlichkeit') and morality ('moralität'), the former being based in the customs and mores of a given society, the latter being a matter of absolute obligation. Natural lawyers (and the classical Greeks) derive their accounts of moral behaviour from an account of human flourishing, what it is to be a fully functioning human being. For Marxists, morality and ethics are ideological notions serving class interests.
Each of these various doctrines - except perhaps the last - has a corresponding notion of 'unethical' behaviour. Clearly behaviour ethical under one system could be unethical under another, and, indeed, the standard texts on applied ethics are characteristically based on just such clashes where one is invited to contemplate the variety of approaches possible to such issues as truth-telling, or abortion or the rights of non-combatants in modern warfare. Are there any commonalties here? Perhaps only that it is difficult to find any system of moral principles which justifies behaviour based solely on narrowly-defined self-interest - as opposed to the many doctrines which regard the long-run, enlightened self-interest of individuals as being compatible with, if not constitutive of, the general good. In summary, to say of someone that they are determined to behave ‘ethically’ tells us that they are not dominated solely by narrow self-interest, which is certainly useful information, but unless the moral principles which define their position can be specified, it tells us very little else. To behave ethically means at a minimum to be sensitive to the interests and/or needs of others, but there are a great many diverse - contradictory even - ways in which this sensitivity can be displayed.
The idea of an ethical foreign policy presumably rests upon an analogy between the state and an individual person. Conventional international relations characteristically sees the state as the possessor of legal personality (critical to any notion of international law), and as the kind of ‘person’ capable of possessing interests (as in the notion of the ‘national interest’, which is at the heart of traditional realism, and even, in the attenuated form of a simple desire to survive, modern neo-realism). For an ethical foreign policy to be possible it is necessary to go further than this and to posit that the state can be the kind of person capable of acting in accordance with a moral principle. As we have seen in the FCO Mission Statement, although it is the Labour Government which does not believe in leaving its values behind when travelling on diplomatic business, it is Britain that will secure the benefit of mutual respect, and - on my reading although the text is slightly ambiguous - it is the British people who are deemed to support the demands for democratic rights that we insist on for ourselves.
My point here is that to believe that the state is the kind of entity capable of behaving ethically is to possess a very ‘high’ doctrine of the state. Rather than seeing foreign policy as the outcome of bargaining between different interests or different organisations – and, for that matter, seeing foreign policy as always a question of foreign policies in the plural – we are invited to see foreign policy as the expression of the will of a unitary actor, a will which can be turned to ethical purposes. It is worth stressing this point because most of those who are keenest to see the development of an ethical foreign policy are, in other circumstances, sceptical of ‘state-as-actor’ approaches to international relations, much less ‘unitary actor’ approaches to the making of foreign-policy. And, as I will argue below, rightly so, because the content of the ethics they generally espouse are incompatible with such approaches.
Putting aside these reservations for the moment, what can be said about the content of an ethical foreign policy, because, as we have seen, the term ‘ethical’ does very little work without further elaboration? Or perhaps it does, because it might be argued that foreign policy is characteristically ‘unethical’ and therefore to advocate an ethical foreign policy is to call for significant change irrespective of the content of the ethics. The argument here would be that states characteristically act in accordance with a narrow, short-run conception of self-interest and that, at a minimum, anything that influenced them in the direction of taking a longer term, more enlightened notion of self-interest would constitute moral progress. The logic of the argument here seems quite solid – but is it actually the case that states characteristically act in accordance with such a conception of self-interest? Advocates of an ethical foreign policy often assume that such egoism is rampant and sanctioned by conventional international (realist) theory and practice. Both assumptions can be contested.
It should be said at the outset that there certainly have been – and still are - states whose rulers are, in effect, a band of criminals out to maximise their own power and wealth with no consideration for anyone other than themselves. Motivated by the purest kind of selfishness, they exploit and oppress their own people and anyone else who comes within range. There are, however, three important points that need to be made about such criminals. First, it is comparatively unusual for them to take power in complex political systems, most of which have institutional arrangements designed to prevent such thugs reaching the top. Fascist and Nazi movements captured power in advanced capitalist states in the inter-war period (only somewhat advanced in the case of Italy), but since 1945 no similar country has fallen in this way. Leninist, Stalinist and Maoist movements have captured power in rather less advanced countries but in each case with at least some claim (however implausible) to be acting in accordance with a conception of the public good even if employing gangster tactics to hold on to power. The paradigm cases of gangster states nowadays are to be found in the 'quasi-states' of the third world (Jackson, 1990). Second, the notion of an ethical foreign policy could have no significance to such gangster states. It is obvious that rulers such as Mobutu or Bokassa (to take two examples who are safely out of the way) are not about to orient their foreign policy towards a moral principle when they are wholly unwilling to adopt a domestic policy which is anything other than criminal. Only in the case of a state in which the rulers already have some sense of the common good is the idea of an ethical foreign policy likely to find any purchase.
The final point here is the most significant; the egoistic, narrowly self-interested 'gangster state' is neither entailed by realist international theory, nor sanctioned by the practices of international society. As to the first, all variants of realism agree that states are, in the last resort, egoists, but nearly all agree (i) that the referent object - the ego - is the people of a state not its rulers (ii) that although enlightened self-interest is difficult to achieve in conditions of international anarchy it is still morally desirable to think long- rather than short- term and (iii) that a focus upon one's own interests is not necessarily incompatible with a concern with the common weal. The kind of 'blood-and-iron' statements of a pure Machtpolitik to be found in the words Thucydides places in the mouths of the Athenians at Melos, or in parts of Machiavelli's Prince are not characteristic of the realism of Morgenthau, Niebuhr, Carr or Kennan, each of whom was, in their different ways far more interested in the interplay between general moral principles and the contingencies of international politics than the caricatured account of realism would suggest (Rosenthal, 1991: Murray, 1997). Contemporary neo-realists are less burdened with Augustinian doubts than their predecessors, and tend to agree that states do act in terms of short run definitions of interests, but this short-termism is, on the neo-realist account, forced upon states by their desire to survive under conditions of anarchy rather chosen freely and immorally (Waltz,1979).
What of the practices of international society? Do they endorse a narrow self-interest? Again I think not. In the twentieth century we have seen no-holds barred ideological clashes in which notions of the common good have gone by the board - although, of course, the participants in these clashes believed themselves to be driven by moral principles and behaving ethically - but in the world of nineteenth century diplomacy a concern for the general interest was rarely wholly absent. A.J.P. Taylor put the matter well in his magisterial survey of The Struggle for Mastery in Europe:
…the world of diplomacy was much like the world of business, in which respect for the sanctity of contract does not prevent the most startling reversals of fortune. Many diplomatists were ambitious, some vain or stupid, but they had something like a common aim - to preserve the peace of Europe without endangering the interests or security of their country (Taylor, 1954: xxiii).
To put the matter differently, the norms and practices of international society actually mandate enlightened rather than narrow self-interest; they call upon states to abstain from intervention in the affairs of others, to obey international law and to co-operate with others wherever possible (Bull, 1977; Nardin, 1983).
In still other words, an 'ethical foreign policy' far from being a novel idea is actually a 'settled norm' of international society (Frost, 1996). States have a primary duty to pursue the interests of their peoples but in the context of a set of wider obligations. On this count, the FCO's Mission Statement is simply a re-statement of common practice, combining enlightened self-interest (obtaining for Britain the benefit of 'mutual respect') with a narrower view of self-interest (such as the prosperity that follows from successful competition for overseas contracts). The difficulty comes, of course, when the short-term and the long-term seem to be working in opposite directions, when prosperity is only achievable by doing things that are not conducive to the production of mutual respect. Traditional accounts of the norms of international society do not tell us what to do in these circumstances - but then neither does the Mission Statement, which places all four goals on an equal footing.
So, to summarise the argument so far, the first problem with the idea of an ethical foreign policy is that it sets up a false opposition - all foreign policy, at least for complex developed political systems, is ethical in the sense that it reflects a concern to follow moral principles. At this point, I suspect, some proponents of an ethical foreign policy will feel I am - perhaps wilfully - missing the point. Enlightened self-interest is incontestably at the heart of many ethical systems, and individuals/states who behave in accordance with its precepts are behaving ethically in some sense of the term, but not in the sense that such proponents desire. The claim that 'we will put human rights at the heart of our foreign policy' is taken, in this latter sense, to point to a will to give priority to human rights over other concerns. On this count an ethical foreign policy is one that refuses to privilege the interests of fellow citizens over those of non-nationals. To be 'ethical' means to follow a moral principle and to follow a moral principle means to act in accordance with, say, the principle of promoting the greatest happiness or the demands of the moral law as made apparent in Kant's Categorical Imperative - in both cases ethical behaviour may well be contrary to our self-interest and cut across the interests of even an enlightened egoism. From this perspective, the demand for an ethical foreign policy certainly would involve a critique of existing practice, and the opposition between ethical and unethical foreign policies would make perfect sense not simply in extreme cases but as a general rule - in other words, on this account of ethics, far from all existing foreign policy being ethical, it is nearer to the truth to say that all foreign policy is unethical.
A number of responses can be made to this critique. First, it should be noted that even as strong an advocate of 'justice as impartiality' as Brian Barry is careful to make a distinction between first-order and second-order impartiality (Barry, 1995). We are not obliged to acknowledge exactly the same obligations towards all our fellow human beings; some discrimination is allowable so long as the principles upon which our obligations can be distinguished are themselves impartial. An extreme utilitarianism may oblige us to refuse to distinguish between our fellows - indeed, to treat our own interests as of no greater significance than those of others - but that is one reason why there are not that many extreme utilitarians around, and those who stick to their principles make rather strange spouses or parents. A more sensible ethical position would make at least some room for self-interest - the serious issue is how to balance the interests of others against our own, how to balance the interests of fellow nationals against those of foreigners.
In any event, anyone who is serious about proposing that we ought not to privilege the interests of our co-nationals over those of foreigners would be ill-advised to try to express that position via the notion of an 'ethical foreign policy'. This is for the reason suggested above, namely that foreign policy by its very nature is statist, and, paradoxically, an explicitly ethical foreign policy implies a very high doctrine of the state. Once one accepts the premise that the state ought to be the key actor in international relations it is rather difficult to go on and argue that the state ought, in fact, to behave as though it were not the key actor, as though humanity as a whole ought to be the moral reference point for state behaviour rather than the interests of its citizens. If that is what one believes to be morally required, surely it would make more sense to promote the emergence of world government rather than to press for an ethical foreign policy?
This discussion bears very much on the nature of contemporary cosmopolitan thought. It has become customary to distinguish between 'moral' and 'institutional' brands of cosmopolitanism (Beitz, 1994). Institutional cosmopolitans look to the emergence of some kind of world government, while moral cosmopolitans look to changed attitudes within the existing order. One can see the attraction of the latter position given the obvious practical difficulties involved in establishing even a loosely federal world government, and the lack of a will on the part of the peoples of the world to overcome these difficulties. At the same time, it seems implausible that the state as such can be harnessed to cosmopolitan goals, and to attempt to do so is likely to produce frustration. Unless cosmopolitans are content to withdraw from the political process altogether - which many of the original 'cosmopolitans' in the Hellenic world were - they would be better advised to take up the task of global institutional design, as indeed, have cosmopolitan democrats such as David Held (Held, 1995).
To summarise the first part of this paper: pace some of the rhetoric of the new Government, the idea of an ethical foreign policy is neither new nor particularly startling. The idea that foreign policy represents enlightened self-interest is a commonplace - the real issues are in the trade-off between short-term and long-term interests; the more radical notion that to be ethical rules out privileging the interests of nationals over foreigners is difficult to turn into an operating basis for foreign policy, and in any event, is clearly not what is intended in the FCO's Mission Statement. What this latter document does contain is a somewhat firmer commitment (on paper at least) to the promotion of human rights than has customarily been the case, and the aim of the second part of this paper is to examine in somewhat greater depth the principles that underlie this commitment, in particular the idea of 'mutual respect'.
Mutual Respect in a Multicultural World
The FCO's Mission Statement of 12 May 1997 promised Britain the benefit of 'Mutual Respect' which would follow from the Government's promotion of 'the values of human rights, civil liberties and democracy which we demand for ourselves.' Human rights were to be at the heart of Britain's foreign policy. Mr. Cook fleshed out further what was involved in this commitment in a keynote speech of 17 July 1997, entitled ‘Human Rights into a New Century’. After presenting a more-or-less conventional list of rights, and delivering a few cutting observations about philosophers spending ‘happy hours’ debating whether these rights can be universal rather than relative, he added
I take a rather more down-to-earth perspective. These are rights which we claim for ourselves and which we therefore have a right to demand for those who do not yet enjoy them…..The right to enjoy our freedom comes with the obligation to support the human rights of others (FCO, 1997c).
It is worth thinking about these statements and, in particular, examining the grammar and vocabulary in which they are expressed. 'We' claim certain rights and declare them to be, from a 'down-to-earth' perspective unproblematically desirable. Because we want them we need have no hesitation in assuming that everyone else wants them. We show our respect for other people by acting on that assumption, that is by inviting them to become more like us - more, we are obliged to demand that they become like us. In fact, of course, even in these documents we do not put it quite as bluntly as that. Instead we define what we would like to think we are like by reference to abstract universals – rights, civil liberties and democracy – and it is to these abstractions that we ask others to conform. The interesting point is whether this is actually much different from urging others to conform to our standards.
The reason this is important will be clear to anyone who has been following recent debates in this area (Brown, 1997a). In the nearly 50 years since the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by the UN in December 1948, an impressive and extensive body of international law has been developed and the list of rights to which Cook refers is now well established – but more recently the universal claims of the human rights movement has been assaulted as an example of Western cultural imperialism. Confucians and other supporters of ‘Asian Values’ attack the individualism of Western notions of human rights in the name of the extended family or kin group. The People’s Republic of China (PRC) routinely refuses to accept the legitimacy of international criticisms of its human rights record, as do the rulers of the authoritarian capitalist regimes of South East Asia. In the name of revealed religion Islamic leaders reject notions of the equality of the sexes and of religious freedom and operate or advocate legal systems which do not meet with approval from Amnesty International. Indigenous peoples advocate group rights as a corrective to the individualism of the UN Declaration (Crawford, 1988). Moreover these positions have, of late, received some, guarded, recognition in international law. The African Charter on Human and People’s Rights of 1981 is adopted ‘taking into consideration the virtues of [the African States] historical tradition and the values of African civilisation’ (Preamble) and stresses collective and family rights. . The Vienna Declaration on Human Rights of 1993 while endorsing universalism spoke also of the need to bear in mind 'the significance of national and regional particularities and various historical, cultural and religious backgrounds' when considering human rights, a formulation which is often, and rightly, seen as undermining somewhat the basic position.
Now, it is quite frequently, and with some justice, pointed out that these criticisms serve the interests of local rulers who can often be accused of hiding their oppressive ways behind a cultural smokescreen. It is certainly convenient for the rulers of illiberal regimes to be able to dismiss criticisms of their rule as stimulated by alien values as well, of course, as being fomented by outside interests. And within the authoritarian capitalist regimes of South East Asia, as in African one-party states and, indeed, in the PRC itself, there are many individuals who while indisputably Malaysian, Zimbabwean or Chinese are also committed to universal human rights. However, it would be a mistake to assume that all the critiques which focus on Western cultural imperialism are in bad faith – even if some clearly are. Equally, it would be a mistake to take at face value the protestations of devotion to human rights characteristic of opponents of these regimes who are seeking Western support; the case of Zambia shows only too clearly that very often it is a case of ‘meet the new boss, just the same as the old boss’. Even a figure such as Aung San Su Chi, whose campaign against the SLORC in Burma/Myanmar is certainly in good faith, has to live with the fact that her father - Aung San - on whose reputation she so much depends for her local support, was in no sense a democratic leader or supporter of human rights.
In any event, and even if, counter to the evidence, all opposition to the notion of universal human rights in the non-western world were to be simply self-serving, it would be unwise to sustain the plausibility of this opposition by using the kind of language employed in the FCO’s Mission Statement, and even more, in the Foreign Secretary’s speeches. The notion that because we value something and insist upon it for ourselves we therefore have a right to demand it for others is a perfect illustration of the imperialist cast of mind. If a practising Muslim Foreign Minister were to make a speech declaring that because he and his co-religionists valued most highly submission to God and recognition of the Prophet as his Messenger, they therefore had the right to demand that all the peoples of the world make a similar profession of faith, I doubt very much whether this would be taken seriously by Western Christians or secular humanists. Certainly such an attitude would hardly be taken as indicative of ‘mutual respect’; on the contrary, it would be regarded as showing great disrespect for the beliefs of others, and, indeed, Muslim leaders are quite frequently accused of displaying just such disrespect, by, for example, taking advantage of liberal Christian gestures towards ecumenicism without reciprocating. Doubtless Mr. Cook would regard this point as insufficiently ‘down-to-earth’ to deserve a reply – but it would be good to see exactly how this perhaps-not-so- hypothetical Muslim position could be distinguished from his own without employing arguments that are obviously question-begging.
In fact, the rather naïve language employed by Cook does serve a useful purpose in encouraging us to try to think about these matters in ways that are not so obviously prejudicial. The language of human rights is very frequently cast in terms of such high abstraction that one loses contact with the basic problem with the notion, which is precisely that rights are grounded in a particular way of life with all its peculiarities – namely that developed in Western Europe and North America over the past century and a half - and some reason has to be given for assuming that that way of life is capable of generating rules of universal validity (Brown, 1997b). If such a reason cannot be found then there is no ethical reason why we should not adopt an altogether different imperative – as Muslims (and fundamentalist Christians) would demand – or, quite simply mind our own business, as non-proselytising Confucian and Hindu critics of human rights would suggest.
If we wish to engage in cross-cultural ethical criticism, which most of us do since the alternative would be a moral relativism which, unattractively, endorsed all long-standing cultural practices, we need a basis upon which to proceed which does not very obviously rest on the political power of one particular civilisation – because ‘mutual respect’ is not available by that route. It is sometimes assumed that such a basis is provided by the developments in the international law of human rights of the past 50 years. This is, I believe, profoundly wrong. It is certainly the case that there is now a considerable body of such law to which most states have subscribed but in many cases their subscription can hardly be regarded as either uncoerced or in good faith. The original UN Declaration was passed by Western or Western-dominated states without the approval of Soviet Bloc states or the one overtly Muslim state then a member of the UN, Saudi Arabia. Since then newly emergent states have generally felt obliged to sign up to the various Covenants on Human Rights because such behaviour is expected of them and because most of them have sought the approval of powerful Western states – not that the latter themselves are above behaviour in breech of human rights norms, rather that they expect their clients to at least pretend to conform. Real attitudes are better displayed by the resolute unwillingness of the majority of states to establish mechanisms for the enforcement of human rights law – only in Western Europe, where there is a real consensus behind the notion of human rights does such a mechanism exist.
A better foundation for human rights is seemingly provided by the political practice of those societies which, however imperfectly, do at least try to take seriously the idea that individuals have rights which they ought to be allowed to assert against government, and the idea that government itself ought as far as possible to be based upon the consent of the governed. I have no doubt but that such societies have been, on the whole, safer and pleasanter to live in for their populations than any others of which we have knowledge. But the notion that the ideas upon which these societies are built are in some sense self-evident, that they encapsulate a general truth about how the world necessarily is which can be transplanted with ease to other differently arranged societies, simply will not do. The very idea that there are ‘individuals’ at all in the modern sense of the term is not self-evident - writers on the classical world from Adkins (1972) to Foucault (1981/87) have shown us how many of the oppositions that modern Europeans think most basic would not have been familiar to classical, much less pre-classical Greeks. Even the idea that human life is in crucial respects different from other forms of life is denied by some very well established religious/ethical positions. The more specific notion of a human life as a 'project' with a beginning and an end is shared by the Religions of the Book – Christianity, Islam, Judaism – and secular humanists in the West, but not by Buddhist or Hindu believers in reincarnation or Confucians who concentrate on the persistence over time of the family; this, incidentally is one of the reasons why the contemporary Western obsession with Islam as the 'Other' is misplaced. There are family resemblances between Islam, Christianity and secularist humanism that do not exist between any of these positions and the religions of the East.
Moreover, the political vocabularies of the modern European state build on distinctions which simply do not exist in other vocabularies – most notably the distinction between ‘public’ and ‘private’. It is interesting that this latter point has been picked up by feminists who have noted the ways in which Western political ideas have not simply provided a framework within which patriarchy could flourish, but have actually been based on patriarchal assumptions. The greatest achievement of Western political thought – the notion of the self-determining republican citizen - is unambiguously patriarchal. The soldier/citizen who since the time of classical Athens has provided us with the picture of what it means to be free could only perform his public role in a context where women were restricted to the private sphere. One of the achievements of contemporary feminism has been to make this relationship visible to all, and the critique has been extended onto the international scene (Peterson, 1990). Part of the way in which the West shaped the UN Declaration on Human Rights of 1948 is by building into the text unconscious patriarchal assumptions about the nature of the family. There is an interesting overlap here between the work of feminists and the critiques of ideas of human rights developed in non-western societies; in each case what is being pointed to is the way in which a set of ideas which set out to be universal cannot avoid privileging a particular conception of the world. Of course, creative tension rather than overlap would be the more appropriate term here since, to put it mildly, assertions of the rights of women have not been a major concern of most non-western critics.
Is there some way we can reconceptualise Western political practice in such a way that its precepts do not look culture-bound and can be advocated without risking the loss of mutual respect? A great deal of contemporary Western political theory addresses this problem, from Rawlsian theories of justice to the ‘critical theory’ of Jürgen Habermas and his followers. The idea here is to attempt to create an artificial foundation for moral debate within and between societies by building upon the idea of a consensus constructed under ideal conditions. There is no actual foundation for morals, but if we can agree amongst ourselves to create such a foundation all will be well. Of course, ideal conditions must be stipulated for this process because it is clear that a consensus under other than ideal conditions will reflect differentials of power and interest but if we can successfully imagine what agreement on normative issues would look like under ideal conditions we will have created a basis for the critique of our own and all other societies. The aim is to reach a situation where the force of a better argument will come through and be effective - once extraneous factors are removed and all voices are allowed to be heard an agreed framework for deciding normative issues is possible, and transcultural notions of community and rights can be argued without ethnocentrism (Linklater, 1998).
This kind of normative theorising is very valuable, and can give added force to a quite common rhetorical tactic in arguments on normative issues - we quite frequently say things like ‘you wouldn’t like that if it was done to you’ or ‘do unto others as you would be done by’ and what the Rawlsian 'veil of ignorance' or the Habermasian 'ideal speech situation' does – potentially at least – is to turn such pieces of folk wisdom into operating principles (Rawls, 1971; Habermas, 1984).
Unfortunately there is a price to be paid for this move. Political life does not take place at the exalted level fundamental to such fictional constructions - it takes place at ground level, with people who are only too aware of who they are and, in particular, who they are not. Say to a BJP militant in India that he wouldn’t like the treatment still handed out by caste Hindus to ‘untouchables’ in villages all over India if he was on the receiving end, and the argument will have no force at all because by his definition he could not be in that position. It might seem obvious to Western theorists of justice that high caste status is the paradigm case of an unearned advantage in life which must not be allowed to shape outcomes, but on the militant’s account this is most definitely not the case and therefore he cannot take the original leap involved in seeing himself in the position of another. Once that leap has been taken the Rawlsian/Habermasian way of looking at things is a good way to proceed – but it doesn’t provide a compelling reason for taking the leap in the first place. To engage in this kind of dialogue is to undertake a re-evaluation of one's values that inevitably will be painful and with no guarantee that the eventual outcome will be more agreeable. Why would those who are comfortable with their values - and, as in the case of the BJP militant, benefit from them - enter into this process in the absence of some compelling reason to think that their situation is untenable?
To summarise this section so far: on the face of it, it would seem that the notion of ‘mutual respect’ which provides the ethical dimension to the new British Government’s foreign policy is tied up with an account of human rights which is all- too-easily describable as ethnocentric and an example of cultural imperialism. To assume that because we desire something others must also is not conducive to mutual respect, unless we can find some reason to justify promoting our predilections which does not presume what it is designed to validate – the superiority of one particular way of life. On the other hand, it is important not to fall into a version of moral relativism which disables any kind of cross-cultural criticism. Even if we are critical of the project of imposing a Western notion of universal human rights on peoples who have developed their own distinctive ways of asserting their humanity, we will almost certainly not wish to argue that any long standing cultural practice is to be accepted simply because it is long-standing. Apart from anything else, such a position would tell against any notion of moral development within cultures. Is there a way of breaking out of the circle here - how do we avoid moving from the ‘moral monism’ of conventional human rights thinking to an undesirable ‘moral relativism’ (Parekh, 1998)?
I suggest there are, potentially, ways of taking this step, but they are incompatible with the rights-based foreign policy currently advocated. They involve moving away from the characteristically ‘modernist’ ways of reasoning described by Stephen Toulmin in his fascinating study Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity. He describes the ways in which in the seventeenth century the insights of renaissance humanism drawn, of course, from the wisdom of the classical world were put aside in the formation of modernity - 'formal logic was in, rhetoric was out; general principles were in, particular cases were out; abstract axioms were in, concrete diversity was out; the permanent was in, the transitory was out' (Toulmin, 1990: 30). Adapting this formula to my concerns, I want to argue that it has been the search for formal logic, general principles, abstract axioms and the permanent that has bedevilled so much of Western thinking about inter-cultural relations; making 'mutual respect' equate to demanding for others the general principles we demand for ourselves is, I think, a perfect illustration of the kind of thinking to which Toulmin refers to as modernist. It is what he calls 'theory-centred' rather than 'practical minded' thinking and – against the assumptions of the Foreign Secretary - philosophical enquiry ought to be practical minded, focusing on the particular, concrete, local details of everyday human affairs rather than the higher realms of abstract principle and general laws.
Such thinking may well seek to promote certain kinds of human values and offer critiques of long-standing cultural practices – such as the Indian caste-system or Saudi legal processes – but it will not do so from a position of superiority. Reading lessons to the Saudis about universal human rights and the iniquities of their legal system is profoundly unlikely to create changes in the direction desired by the preachers. What is required in these cases - and more generally - is a different kind of rhetoric. The need is for Westerners to find ways of expressing their views on these matters which do not belittle and demean the people to whom these views are addressed, and which play into the hands of those who seek accommodation rather than those who seek to heighten the tension. Finally in this section let me briefly suggest one or two possibilities here.
Richard Rorty still uses the term ‘human rights’ but he speaks of a ‘human rights culture’ and is clear that such a culture cannot be grounded in any foundationalist account (Rorty, 1993). We in the West must learn that our own values and institutions do not represent some kind of truth about the world that can be rationally justified to non-westerners. Liberal values and institutions minimise cruelty and should be supported, but our support for these values will always be tinged with irony because we are aware that there are no foundations here. The ‘liberal ironist’ will want to promote her values, but cannot do so by reference to truth and reason – those who treat their fellow human beings with cruelty cannot be persuaded that they are being irrational in so doing. Instead, we must engage in an education of the sentiments – we must tell stories that appeal to the imagination of the oppressor, inviting the latter to consider what it would be like to be a victim. As suggested above, it might be doubted whether this move will be very effective – my BJP militant is unlikely to be impressed by demonstrations that non-caste Indians have the same kind of feelings he does – and there is some (contested) evidence that when heroic actions on behalf of others have occurred, the rescuers quite frequently act in response to general ideas rather than the kind of localised sentiments on which Rorty relies (Geras, 1995). Still, Rorty’s attempt to think about the kinds of rhetoric that might appeal to the oppressor suggests that he is on the right track; he is at least inviting rather than demanding that the other become like us.
Perhaps more promising is the appeal to a minimal essentialism characteristic of some neo-Aristotelians and virtue ethicists. The claim here is that it may be possible to use the idea of the virtues to construct the kind of account of what it is to be human that would not be vulnerable to the charge of cultural imperialism. The 'virtues' are frames of mind which orient one towards characteristic human experiences. As Martha Nussbaum puts it, paraphrasing Aristotle,
Everyone (my emphasis) has some attitude (her emphasis), and corresponding behaviour, towards her own death; her bodily appetites and their management; her property and its use; the distribution of social goods; telling the truth; being kind to others; cultivating a sense of play and delight, and so on. No matter where one lives one cannot escape these questions, so long as one is living a human life. (Nussbaum, 1993)
Nussbaum is a classicist who became involved in issues of cultural relativism while working for the UN University on one of its development programmes. Coming into this context from the outside she was horrified by the kind of arguments she heard there which, apparently, represented exactly the kind of moral relativism I suggested earlier we should try to avoid. She mentions with understandable anger a case presented against the eradication of a particular disease on the basis that this malaise was in some sense part of the authentic lives of the peoples it afflicted! Nussbaum's goal in trying to describe the shape of a human life is, I think, to provide a minimalist account of the circumstances under which human flourishing can occur. There may be - will be - a great many different ways in which human beings can live a human life, but on this account there are limits to the acceptable range of differences. There are some kinds of lives that preclude human flourishing and which we ought not to be prepared to see as fully human.
We make this latter judgement not on the basis of the worth of our own institutions, but in the context of characteristic human experiences which we have some reason to regard as universal. As with Rorty’s approach this is not a compelling argument – the BJP militant who has become the official ‘other’ of this paper would presumably not be prepared to countenance an argument which involved equating his experience with those of inferiors. Nonetheless, and unlike Rorty, it only involves calling upon the other to be like us in a minimal sense; it does not suggest that the only way to achieve a truly human life is by adopting Western political institutions. Mutual respect is possible on the basis of an appeal to something that is shared rather than something of ‘ours’ which ‘we’ think ‘you’ should have.
Conclusion
In order to bring the two parts of this paper together, we might ask what kind of foreign policy someone who is concerned to promote human flourishing and minimise cruelty ought to support. Certainly such a policy ought to be based on the norms and practices of international society, and a long-term, enlightened, conception of state interest. This, in itself, would rule out, for example, support for the sale of arms to dictatorships. Ought one to go beyond this to advocate a 'rights-based' foreign policy? I suggest that instead of thinking of foreign policy this way, a better alternative would be to promote a constructive engagement between cultures and peoples over human values at the level of the emerging global civil society. ‘Constructive engagement’ as a foreign policy almost inevitably degenerates into a cynical sham in which diplomats and ministers visiting regimes such as those of China or Indonesia have at least one well-publicised exchange about human rights in between the real business of selling things – and, of course, double-standards are the norm. It is a safe bet that Prime Minister Tony Blair in his visit with President Clinton in February 1998 did not raise the issue of executions in the US, even though the death penalty is now regarded as incompatible with the European human rights regime, and the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in the UK has declared that with respect to those areas where it still has jurisdiction in the Commonwealth where capital punishment is applied, delays of over five years waiting on death row constitute cruel and unusual punishment. Moreover, It is difficult to see how things could be otherwise, given the exigencies of international politics with which states have to be concerned.
Instead, the attitude of liberal states towards oppressive regimes ought to be for the most part, as the old term has it, ‘correct’ – that is somewhat distant and decidedly unengaged. Occasionally in response to particular atrocities some kind of public disavowal may be required, but for the most part denunciation ought to be left to the various private groups that are gradually creating a web of institutions across the world which might, in the medium- run turn into a real global civil society. The role of the liberal state ought to be to provide a framework of international law and as much protection as it can to such groups and the society they create. The latter will use a range of different strategies to attempt to influence governments, and one such strategy may well, in some circumstances, be an appeal to the rhetoric of rights, but the burden of this paper is that such a rhetoric will quite often not be appropriate or helpful. The task of those who wish to promote human flourishing is to develop other rhetorics more consonant with genuine mutual respect between people
[The second Part of this paper draws upon a Public Lecture presented at the University of Southampton on 3 February 1998, entitled 'Is 'mutual respect' the modern Requirement? Cultural Pluralism and International Political Theory]
References
Adkins, A.W.H. (1972) Moral Values and Political Behaviour in Ancient Greece (London: Chatto and Windus)
Barry, B. (1995) Justice as Impartiality (Oxford: Oxford University Press)
Beitz, C.R. (1979) Political Theory and International Relations (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press)
Brown, C. (1997a) 'Human Rights' in Baylis, J. and Smith, S. (eds) The Globalisation of World Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press)
Brown, C. (1997b) 'Universal Human rights: A Critique' The International Journal of Human Rights Vol. 1, No. 2
Bull, H. (1977) The Anarchical Society (London: Macmillan)
Crawford, J. (1998) (ed) The Rights of Peoples (Oxford: Clarendon Press)
FCO (1997a) Mission Statement for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, 12 May 1997 (http://www.fco.gov.uk/aboutfco/mission/)
FCO (1997b) 'British Foreign Policy' Opening Statement by the Foreign Secretary at a Press Conference on the FCO Mission Statement, 12 May 1997 (http://www.fco.gov.uk/texts/1997/may/12/mspc.txt)
FCO (1997c) 'Human Rights into the Next Century' Foreign Secretary's Keynote Speech, 17 July 1997 (http://www.fco.gov.uk/keythemes/humanrights/
Foucault, M. (1981/87) The History of Sexuality Vols. I -III (Harmondsworth: Penguin)
Geras, N. (1995) Solidarity in the Conversation of Humankind: The Ungroundable Liberalism of Richard Rorty (London: Verso)
Habermas, J. (1984) The Theory of Communicative Action Vols I & II (Cambridge: Polity Press)
Held, D. (1995) Democracy and the Global Order: From the Modern State to Cosmopolitan Governance (Cambridge: Polity Press)
Jackson, R. (1990) Quasi-States: Sovereignty, International Relations and the Third World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)
Linklater, A. (1998) The Transformation of Political Community (Cambridge: Polity Press)
Murray, A.J.H. (1997) Reconstructing Realism: Between Power Politics and Cosmopolitan Ethics (Edinburgh: Keele University Press)
Nardin, T. (1983) Law, Morality and the Relations of States (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press)
Norman, R. (1983) The Moral Philosophers (Oxford: Clarendon Press)
Nussbaum, M. (1993) 'Non-Relative Virtues: An Aristotelian Approach' in Nussbaum and Sen, A. (eds) The Quality of Life (Oxford: Clarendon Press)
Parekh, B. 'Moral diversity and the Search for Non-Ethnocentric Universalism' in Dunne, T. and Wheeler, N. (eds) Human Rights in Global Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)
Peterson, V.S. (1990) 'Whose Rights? A Critique of the "Givens" in Human rights Discourse' Alternatives Vol.15
Rawls, J. (1971) A Theory of Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press)
Rorty, R. (1993) 'Human Rights, Rationality and Sentimentality' in Shute, S and Hurley, S. (eds) On Human Rights: The Oxford Amnesty Lectures, 1993 (New York: Basic Books)
Rosenthal, J. (1991) Righteous Realists (Baton Rouge LA: University of Louisiana Press)
Taylor, A.J.P. (1954) The Struggle for Mastery in Europe 1848-1918 (Oxford: Clarendon Press)
Toulmin, S. (1990) Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press)
Waltz, K. (1979) Theory of International Politics (Reading MA: Addison-Wesley)
Warnock, G. J. (1967) Contemporary Moral Philosophy (London: Macmillan)