The National Interest
Summer 2001

Natural Rights and Human History

by Francis Fukuyama

 

. . . Americans more than most peoples have tended to conflate rights and interests. By transforming every individual desire into a right unconstrained by community interests, one increases the inflexibility of political discourse. The debates in the United States over pornography and gun control would appear much less Manichaean if we spoke of the interests of pornographers rather than their fundamental First Amendment right to free speech, or the needs of assault weapon owners rather than their sacred Second Amendment right to bear arms. Arguably, the same inflexibility appears when rights are invoked at an international level. A country that makes human rights a significant element of its foreign policy tends toward ineffectual moralizing at best, and unconstrained violence in pursuit of moral aims at worst. Countries that think of themselves as having only national interests, on the other hand, can pursue a policy of realpolitik that, it is said, is safer both for the country in question and for the international system as a whole. . .