Counter culture, hegemony and human rights rights and resistance under the cold war

Perhaps the easiest way to begin is by noting that two schools of thought dominate thinking on human rights under the Cold War. The first school promotes as rich period for human rights the time roughly between the end of the Second World War and the fall of the Berlin Wall; or perhaps the founding of the United Nations to the collapse of the Eastern bloc (marked by the 1991 end of the Soviet Union). Growing number of signatories to human rights treaties, the growing number of human rights treaties themselves, and the incorporation of rights treaties (or at least dimensions of them) into the policies of states and international organizations concerned with the sustenance of a progressive civil society are the basis for this optimism.1 While some analysts, such as Roger Normand and Sarah Zaidi, view (among other issues) the tripartite division of the International Bill of Human Rights (IBHR) into the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR, 1948), the Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (CESCR, 1966) and the Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (CCPR, 1966) a matter of human rights “deadlock” (for which read “Cold War ideological conflict”), others see the proliferation of such concepts and documents as crucial to the “extending [of] rights” and the “setting [of rights] standards.”2 Nonetheless, the concept of what some have termed a “deep freeze” of human rights under the Cold War should be taken seriously.3 Wade M. Cole, for example, has shown that signings and ratifications of the CESR and CCPR over the course of the Cold War increased.4 However, those signings and ratifications spiked around 1990 (about 50 percent of the total up to the years indicating the end of the Cold War). This had to do with new, post-Cold War membership in the United Nations (UN) – 21 new states joined the organization between 1990 and 1993. However, such a spike in signatories far outstrips the rates of new membership (between 1990 and 1993 new membership in the UN grew at about 14 percent).5 This leads to questions of the “culture” surrounding human rights under the Cold War. In other words, what was the discursive and socio-political status of human rights in the international, or “world,” climate of social and political relations between 1945 and 1989? What was the place of human rights in a generalized view of what one might term the Cold World “world order?” Norberto Bobbio has termed the post-Cold War era the “age of rights”; this indicates a certain mainstreaming of the human rights idea.6 Should the Cold War beseen in a different light? Was the Cold War a less “kind” age to human rights than our own, with the buttresses of support for rights ideals coming from more “marginal” than “mainstream” power locales? Historiographical and cultural critical approaches suggest that the answer is “yes” to both questions. In other words, Cold War relations with human rights were in fact not nearly as mainstream in global culture as they are today; buttresses of support were more marginal than mainstream. One might refer to this as the “pleasure” of human rights; a kind of human rights’ enjoyment of ideological and discursive pre-eminence. In essence, it will be suggested here that it was in the interest of the major Cold War powers to downplay the human rights ideal for much of the period 1945-89. It was both in the interest of Realpolitik as well as in the interest of avoiding international criticism of regrettable domestic policies and practices. That is to say that both the United States and the Soviet Union were clearly engaged in dubious foreign policy interventions and (equally clearly) oppressive and inhumane domestic social policies and practices, when measured by the declared human rights standards of the day. It is undoubtedly the case that both the Americans and Soviets advanced particular varieties of human rights at specific times. These came at differing moments during the Cold War, but such advancements were far from consistent and were often tainted with a pragmatic, Realpolitik cynicism. This made the credibility of such advancements dubious to the more serious human rights activists. Still – and this becomes an important question – what does, or did constitute a “more serious” human rights activist (or at least “advocate”)? In other words, who, if hegemonic powers could not be counted on for consistent human rights advocacy, could be counted on to consistently push international human rights agendas – again recognizing that central powers did at certain times push for specific, and ultimately beneficial, human rights practices (as in the case of the Helsinki Accords of 1975)? Who “believed” in human rights in such a way that they became more than a matter of rhetorical, occasional, strategy or commitment? Ultimately the answer is the marginalized themselves. Theoretically, this is a complex answer. First, notions of marginalization involve accessing the supposed inaccessible voices of what cultural theorist Gayatri Spivak has termed the “subaltern” – voices on the margins of global society taken as a whole.7 Lack of access to the voices of the oppressed may be part-and-parcel of their oppression (meaning they may perhaps be inaccessible). Nonetheless, it may be possible to conceive of the global playing field under the Cold War as a range of oppressive, or at least hegemonic, power sites – racism, crackdowns on free speech, political-economic exploitation, systems of colonization and mechanisms of gender oppression – that are in addition to lines of power within international relations. In part, this concerns the nature of oppression itself. As Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe emphasize in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (1985), oppression, or at least the relations constructing it, are always that – relations. “Nodes” of “hegemony,” as they term them, or cultural and political domination, are never singular.8 Hegemony is always a problem of the relative exploitation of social power and power’s various modes of representation. As AntonioGramsci phrased it, the question is “the general direction imposed on social life by …dominant fundamental group[s].”9 In other words, the questions for hegemony, as well as counter cultural resistances opposing it, are twofold. First, how do we outline dominant groups? In terms of human rights, this often concerned leading Cold War powers such as the United States and Soviet Union – or at least the US, the USSR and their allies. However, using another Gramscian vocabulary, the US and USSR qua state actors also often constituted but one part of a “historical bloc.”10 Historical blocs contain within them diverse ranges of state and non-state actors, belief systems, cultural presumptions and modes of behavior. In the context of the Cold War these either attempted to diminish human rights concepts or attempted to prevent the future intellectual development of rights as they impacted upon a broad and increasingly diverse array of social norms. “Historical blocs” allowed what were often competing interests to coalesce as one in opposition to, or fear of, the interests of others (those on the margins, or states they did not like). Such a picture of human rights under the Cold War might be addressed in two ways. First, we will address historiographies that emphasize “subaltern” or “marginal” groups as the consistent keepers of the human rights flame. In this narrative, subalterity or marginality came largely in the form of “small states,” representatives of the colonized, as well as representatives of the ethnically or gender oppressed, though peace movements and those concerned with global socio-economic justice were also part of the picture (and, it should be noted, socialism often placed itself in an anti-hegemonic position in a battle against those perceived forces of capitalism and liberalism that threatened it). The picture provided here will be broad; it will provide only the headlines of emerging scholarship. The current chapter also seeks, however, to create a theoretical matrix that will help to put hegemony and counter culture into perspective; how does one unravel and get to the heart of a systemic sense of dominance in global systems, and how can one establish abstract reflections on these issues in a way that gives meaning to Cold War relations with rights ideals? With regard to cultural problematics – and acknowledging sociological world-systems theories such as those developed by Immanuel Wallerstein – “global” or “world” hegemony is difficult to define.11 Following amalgamations of recent social theories, “global” or “world” hegemonic systems will be considered “logic[s] of rule”12 that concern the management of “subject positions.”13 The question is what role do human rights’ play – not only in global systems, but in politics as a mode of representation and a dimension of social life. In this context, “global systems” concerns the relatedness of human social systems and the ability to discuss Cold War history at multiple political, social and cultural levels. Global systems in the twentieth century concern the creation of identities that both encompass and transform roles in multiple social, cultural and political systems, with society, culture and politics always attached. Indeed, “transformation” in particular becomes a watchword. Ultimately, it will be argued, “Cold War human rights” were the property of those who sought to transform; human rights were the property of those who positioned themselves “against.” The power of“transformation” and the “against,” or “counter culture,” during the Cold War, came via challenging forces of “national interest” as well as other entrenched lines of hegemonic power (gender, ethnic identity, etc.) that attempted between 1945 and 1989 to organize the dynamics of global society to their benefit.14.