Once ratified, all of these conventions have the force of international law behind them. The member states and every citizen of every country can be held liable for any violations of the statutory safeguards contained in the treaties. Nation-states lose their absolute control over questions regarding the treatment of their citizens and are now subject to a higher authority. Unfortunately, the enforcement mechanisms are weak. Because the UN has no independent enforcement power of its own, it must rely on intergovernmental agreement for the imposition of any sanctions on violations of human rights. Without the consent of the UN Security Council, the UN body is powerless to act. Often, member states are juggling competing strategic interests and agendas and are reluctant to impose tough sanctions, even in the case of extreme violations of human rights, including genocide. And herein lies the dilemma. Universal human rights are meant to supercede the laws of the nation-states. Yet, under the current UN system, nation-states retain the power—via their vote in the UN Security Council and General Assembly—to thwart the implementation of human rights laws. This means that the UN is left with little recourse short of garnering worldwide public support for sanctions and hoping that the pressure will push member nations to act responsibly and wisely.
From the very beginning, international CSOs have played a critical role as catalysts in the preparation and adoption of human rights conventions as well as monitors in the enforcement of the agreements. Women’s organizations were instrumental in framing the 1979 Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women. Amnesty International and the International Commission of Jurists made important contributions to the UN Declaration and Convention Against Torture. Environmental organizations were instrumental in helping shape the 1992 UN Treaty on Biodiversity.
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Although the UN does not yet enjoy extraterritorial authority to enforce universal human rights, the European Union does—making it the first nonterritorial political institution in history with the power to compel compliance to universal human rights statutes among its member countries and the 455 million people living within its jurisdiction.
The member states of the European Union are bound by the provisions of the European Convention on Human Rights, a sweeping document covering universal human rights. With the impending ratification of the European Union Constitution, additional universal human rights will be adopted as official law. The European Court of Human Rights is vested with the authority to arbitrate the provisions of the European Convention, and the European Court of Justice is responsible for judicial oversight in regard to member state compliance with the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union. The judicial powers of both the Court of Human Rights and the European Court of Justice supersede the judicial authority of any of the member states of the Union. Moreover, all EU citizens have the right to appeal decisions made against them in a domestic court in the European Court of Human Rights.
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By decoupling human rights from territoriality, the European Union has ventured into a new political frontier, with far-reaching consequences for the future of the human race. While the world has watched attentively as the EU created a seamless commercial zone and trading market, complete with a common currency, to bind its member nations more closely together, of far greater long-term impact is the EU’s success in establishing a full range of universal human rights and subjecting its member states and citizens to strict compliance, backed up by the power of legal enforcement. There is no precedent for this decoupling. As political scientist Carlos Closa Montero observes, “The defining and primordial element of citizenship is the enjoyment of political rights.”
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But citizenship, heretofore, has always been attached exclusively to a nation-state. What happens, then, to the very idea of the state, when the political rights of its members are conferred and guaranteed by an extraterritorial body? Philosopher Roger Scruton goes to the heart of the matter. He writes, “International law does not recognize the distinction between citizenship and nationality and regards the first as completely determined by the second.”
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By granting European Union citizenship to the 455 million citizens of its twenty-five member countries, the EU has created a new nonterritorial but nonetheless legally binding form of political representation. Add to this the fact that the European Convention on Human Rights, backed up by the European Court of Human Rights and the European Court, affords every “EU citizen” universal human rights that override their traditional nation-state political rights, and we begin to understand the profound significance of the EU experiment. Sociologist Yasemin Soysal sums it up this way: “What we have is a trend towards a new model of membership anchored in deterritorialized notions of person rights.”
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This transnational idea of citizenship may help create a new sense of belonging for all of the disparate individuals and groups who no longer feel comfortable thinking of themselves exclusively as citizens of a particular country with all of the political limitations and constraints that go along with territorial affiliation in a global age. The EU citizen is the first in the world to be fully guaranteed universal human rights enforceable by law. The EU’s example, however, will likely be followed by others, as globalization forces a concomitant expansion of rights to include enforceable universal human rights.
Sociologist Gerard Delanty argues that the new kind of de-territorialized citizenship may be the only way to rebundle the multitude of competing interests and agendas that currently divide people into a more coherent whole. He writes, “Since a collective European identity cannot be built on language, religion or nationality without major divisions and conflicts emerging, [European] citizenship may be a possible option.”
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The more difficult part is convincing Europeans to feel as passionate about their human rights as past generations have felt about their civil rights, political rights, and social rights.
The former rights weren’t suddenly articulated and embraced whole cloth. Rather, they were the embodiment of a long struggle to redefine human aspirations. In a very real sense, these earlier rights represent the codification of the last great human dream that emerged in the Enlightenment and matured with the spread of market capitalism and the coming of age of the nation-state. That dream, which is still very much alive in the U.S., has all but run its course in Europe. Now Europeans have a new dream, one more expansive than the one they left behind: to enjoy a quality of life, to respect one another’s cultures, to create a sustainable relationship with the natural world, and to live in peace with their fellow human beings. Universal human rights are the legal articulation of the new European Dream. The European Dream and universal human rights come together as a single package. The Dream is the aspiration; the rights are the behavioral norms for fulfilling Europeans’ hopes for the future.
The real issue is how deep Europeans’ yearning is for a new story about themselves. Can the European Dream find an accommodation between the particularity of older, more diverse, and often divergent cultural traditions and values on the one hand, and universal human rights on the other, when the two often clash? How effective will international civil society movements likely be at “thinking globally and acting locally”? Can they serve as a political bridge between local cultures and global values? Will the EU experiment with de-territorialized citizenship—subject to universal human rights statutes—survive? How likely is it that this radical new approach to the notion of citizenship will be extended to other regions of the world in the twenty-first century, or will it remain a European curiosity?
The success of the European Dream will depend as much on political acumen as on human psychology. The older American Dream, grounded in Reformation theology and Enlightenment philosophy, owed its success, in large part, to the effective welding together of property rights, markets, and nation-state governance. Property rights made predictable market relations possible. Nation-states, in turn, were the regulatory vehicles, which, by dint of their monopoly over the enactment and enforcement of legal codes, taxation, and police power, were able to exact broad compliance to a private property regime and the Enlightenment project of material progress.
The new European Dream brings together a different mix, made up of universal human rights, networks, and multilevel governance. Human rights are the norms that govern network activity. The European Union, in turn, is the regulatory mechanism whose managerial authority and moral legitimacy make possible the continuous dialogue among the parties to advance the dream of global consciousness.
The older Enlightenment vision and the new European Dream reflect two very different notions of freedom. As we mentioned in previous chapters, in the old dream, freedom is defined negatively as autonomy. To be free is not to be dependent on others. To be self-possessed requires sufficient property. With property, one can enjoy exclusivity and be free from the encroachment of others. The struggle for freedom in the modern world, not surprisingly, has been fought along class lines, and claims over capital have become the heart of the struggle to be free. Civil rights, political rights, and social rights were all designed, in one way or another, to advance property interests. They were norms of behavior whose primary reason for being was to narrow the divide between the possessed and the dispossessed.
In the new European Dream, freedom is defined in the exact opposite manner. To be free is to be enmeshed in interdependent relationships with others. The more inclusive and deeper the relationships, the more likely one will be able to fulfill his or her ambitions. To be included, one requires access. The more access one enjoys, the more relationships one can enter into and the more freedom one experiences.
If property rights are essential to achieving autonomy, universal human rights are critical to securing inclusion. Human rights are all about inclusion. They speak to the rights of women, minorities, cultural groups, the disabled, children, our fellow creatures, to all have their interests equally included. Universal human rights are a guarantee that a person’s very being will be considered and not left out. The struggle for freedom in a globalizing world is fought over identity claims and access to others. Universal human rights are behavioral norms that narrow the divide between the connected and the unconnected, the included and the excluded.
But if every group has its unique identity and competing and conflicting claims on the world, what motivates people to agree to other people’s demands to be recognized and included? Empathy. Recognizing in the frailty, vulnerability, and struggle of others one’s own life struggle. While people have different outlooks on the world and seek different paths in life, what we all share in common is the struggle to be recognized. “To be or not to be.” How does one operationalize empathy? By “doing unto others as we would have others do unto us” or, just as important, “by not doing unto others as we would not have others do unto us.”
The Politics of Empathy
As already mentioned, empathy is not only an innate predisposition but also a learned process. It requires constant and continuous engagement with others. One’s empathy matures and deepens in proportion to one’s active involvement with others. And this is where the new network multilevel approach to governance plays a pivotal role. It’s the forum for people to be represented and recognized and to have their interests accommodated. But for network multilevel governance to work for some, it must also work for others. Networks are based on the notion that every player counts and that no player alone can dictate outcomes. Networks require a letting go, a willingness to trust, listen to others, reciprocate and compromise. One enters a network with the idea that optimizing the welfare of the whole is essential to optimizing one’s own individual interest. In other words, unlike markets, which are adversarial and competitive, networks are interdependent and cooperative. One surrenders some authority to the group, not necessarily out of a sense of benevolence but rather out of a shared frailty and vulnerability. In a complex, multilayered, densely interactive world, no one can go it alone. Like it or not, everyone is vulnerable and at risk. The threats are global, and no one can be truly isolated from the consequences. In a world of risk, cooperation ceases to be a luxury and becomes a necessity for survival.
Network governance, then, is a way to pool risks in order to advance everyone’s interests. But in the very process of engaging with others in multilevel governance, each player becomes aware of the others’ struggle to be counted and recognized. Multilevel governing networks are like giant laboratories for the exploration of empathy. This new form of governance succeeds only to the extent that all the players can reach out and empathize with the aspirations and plight of others. The reconciling of disparate interests depends, first and foremost, on the acceptance of the shared struggle for recognition. Universal human rights, in turn, codify recognition. They are nothing more or less than statements of acceptance of “the other,” whether it be women, minorities, different cultures, children, our fellow creatures, or the Earth we jointly inhabit.
Recognizing “the other” is a tough and painful process. It requires giving up a measure of hegemony. For example, how does a devout Muslim or Orthodox Jewish male learn to surrender his control over his community and recognize the equal right of women to fully participate in that community and in the world at large? A tall order, and not something likely to be accepted overnight. But multilevel governance at least provides a meeting place, a playing field, for engaging one another. If one wants to be recognized and have his or her agenda met, he or she has to be willing to listen to and accommodate the interests of others in the network. Of course, one can choose not to play at all, but the price of not participating is isolation, which is the ultimate expression of nonrecognition. The struggle for recognition in a globalizing world is likely to be as vigorously championed and hotly contested in the twenty-first century as the class struggle was in the twentieth century.