Understanding global security - Peter Hough

SOCIAL IDENTITY AS A THREAT TO SECURITY
case that scientific relativity ought to inform our understanding of morality. ‘[T]here
is no single true morality. There are many different moral frameworks, none of which
is more correct than the others’ (Harman 1996: 8). Cultural relativism comes in
various strengths. The strongest position is to reject any notion of universal human
rights, but the more moderate form asserts that the rights of the collective should
temper the prescription of individual liberty. 13 There is a flavour of moderate
relativism in the Banjul Charter’s emphasis on the rights of ‘peoples’, alongside
individual rights. ‘They (peoples) shall freely determine their political status and
shall pursue their economic and social development according to the policy they
have freely chosen’ (Article 20).
Neither the Banjul Charter nor an anthropologically enriched UN regime, of
course, have had to stand the course of practical implementation. Simultaneously
upholding both individual and collective rights is highly problematic. Rwandan
Tutsis, as a collective, freely chose to slaughter 800,000 individual Hutus for their own
social, political and economic development. Existing universalist human rights
certainly did not save the Hutus, but this was due to a lack of will to implemement
existing legislation. Prioritizing collective cultural rights and state sovereignty over
those of individuals would not only fail to stop genocide but even to offer a defence
of it.
The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights was written and signed at a
time when the membership of the UN was far from universal. Much of Africa and Asia
was still under the colonial yoke and hence not represented among the independent
states making up the General Assembly. The declaration does reflect western liberal
philosophy in its focus on protecting the individual from the tyranny of the state and
resembles in particular the US and French constitutions. The cultural imposition
argument, however, is overstated. No state voted against the Declaration and most
of the abstainers were later brought on board. Although Saudi Arabia objected to the
notion of religious freedom, other Islamic states such as Syria, Iran and Pakistan
did not (Robertson 2000: 32). The USSR and its East European allies objected to the
lack of emphasis in the Declaration given to economic and social rights, but this
was rectified in the development of the twin covenants that followed 1948. The
twin covenants stand as a broad legal instrument empowering individuals with both
rights against states and entitlements from states going beyond most western bills
of rights.
A fundamental weakness with relativist arguments with regard to human rights
is that they presuppose that societies or cultures can secure the rights of their
individual constituents endogenously. Nations as social entities are rarely, if ever,
directly represented in the political world. Multiculturalism, whether arrived at
through migration or historical accident (such as in the partitioning of Africa), is the
norm in the modern state system. If the states of the world mirrored its distinct
‘cultures’, ethical/cultural relativism would stand as a realistic alternative to universalism
in protecting human rights. In the real world, however, how are the rights
of cultural minorities within states to be fully safeguarded? The fact that national or
religious minorities are frequently imperilled rather than protected by states cannot
be questioned. The homogeneous ‘traditional’ culture advanced by relativists is rarely
found in the countries to which it is attributed and complaints of the inappropriateness
of ‘western’ human rights are usually made by tyrannical regimes trying to justify
129