[TLDR (too long didn’t read): If you are reading this, chances are you care about HR. This Reader is about power politics in all its forms and at different levels and how it affects HR. For a quick overview, just read the bolded text]. Traducir/traduire los/les Readers; usar/utiliser deepl.com
—We are in the midst of a great power politics tragedy, and the situation is getting worse, and fast. (John J. Mearsheimer, Jeffrey Sachs)
1. We live in a world where the overriding goal of each state is to maximize its share of world power –which means gaining power at the expense of other states. But great powers do not merely strive to be the strongest of all the great powers –although that is seen as a welcome outcome… Their ultimate aim is to be the hegemon, that is, the only great power in the system. The struggle to be the hegemon means endless strife, as it is impossible that every nation, or indeed any nation, achieves global hegemony.
2. Since no state is likely to achieve global hegemony, the world is condemned to perpetual great power competition and to repeated wars, ergo to human rights (HR) violations galore. As countries converge in economic and military power, they begin to compete more aggressively for domination. Rising powers fear that they will be held back by incumbent powers –…and so goes the world. (J. J. Mearsheimer, J. Sachs)
And since we are talking about power…
—The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must. (Thucydides, 5th Century BC) (…must they?)
3. As neoliberal global restructuring advances, to a large extent, the free (?) enterprise acts as a mask for what really is a relentless concentration of power and the exclusion of the weakest by the strongest. (Oscar Gonzalez) The ‘free (?) enterprise’ is a large part of what neoliberals mean by freedom, is it not? So, I would then conclude that a) those who are too trusting of freedom must expect to be taken advantage-of (right?), and b) many may want freedom for themselves, but fear the freedom of others. I am not trying to be facetious here, but this is one of several ways in which the concept of HR may be (or does get) corrupted. (Colin Tudge)
4. You know how it goes: Some individuals are deemed to be more important than others and the most important individuals/entities are granted more rights based on their power. Those with (excess) power and rank are then expected to take care-of or at least respect the rights of those with less. In modern, neoliberalism the latter HR principle seems to have gone pitifully missing. (C. Tudge)
I do not think that entities that are allowed to become so powerful can ever respect human rights (Alison Katz)
5. There clearly is an inherent contradiction that few are willing to point out. I think that banning transnational corporations must be made an objective. For this, we need researchers in commercial law and in HR to devise ways of doing this. (Just think: What happened to laws on monopoly? There used to be hundreds of newspapers, and today about a dozen media giants control information worldwide. What about the car industry? Today giant mergers mean monopoly). (A. Katz)
6. The serious problems of our economic system with its HR consequences have, by now, been exposed. The continuing drain of wealth shows that we live under a system that creates winners and losers. More specifically, a world where a few live off the toil of the many. The past years have, quite understandably, triggered social unrest –amid rising costs of living, inflation and decreasing value of wages. This unrest in countries rendered poor has become visible even to external funding nations. Foreign funders, mandated ‘to use public money to address poverty and inequality in the global South’, are slowly being compelled to talk about power. In 2023, a report produced through the OECD-DAC, the bloc of the world’s major foreign funders, referred to the challenges of ‘colonial legacies*, top-down decision making and power imbalances’. (IBON)
*: The colonial legacy created the following trade benefits for the colonializing state:
–access to raw materials in colonized countries with neither profit sharing with locals nor any say about how raw materials are exploited nor profit sharing with local communities except with their coopted elites;
-neocolonial countries are captive markets for industrialized powers who create export and import conditions favoring their manufacturing goods. [(We are price-takers, not price-makers (Julius Nyerere)]; and
-neocolonial powers created and maintain infrastructures that serve their purposes (trains bringing raw materials to ports often controlled by them or their local elites rather than serve social mobility or local enterprises. (Raymond Saner)
7. So, these days, even donors are calling for recipient countries to follow ‘their own development path’. (Are we to trust this…?)** (IBON)
**: A sign of the times: Locally led development and rebalancing power in international decision-making is growing in official rhetoric though. But development cooperation (?) has yet to fully account for the economic domination exerted on recipient countries, and the losses arising therefrom, i.e., the global South was deeply integrated into the world economy in ways that benefit dominant interests, contributing to the imbalances that current foreign funders now ‘claim to be addressing’. Can locally-led development be achieved while retaining politico-economic structures that are patently channeling wealth from the developing towards the developed countries? (IBON) Food for thought.
At best, what is happening today is the re-ordering and re-shaping of ‘new’ welfare states. (Francine Mestrum)
8. While Northern systems of welfare states (that protect some HR) have been under attack during the neoliberal offensive, today there is almost a consensus on the urgent need to better protect people in order ‘to make the market economy function better’. Once more, this is a confirmation of the contradictions of the welfare state. Capitalism does not want welfare, but needs it! But the modern welfare state puts an emphasis on supporting economic productivity, not really social protection, arguing that it is social productive investments that are necessary for the aging population. This shows not all neoliberal-inspired elements have disappeared. Ultimately, it is the needed income protection of eligible recipients that the neoliberals shy away from .***
***: “I am not afraid to die, I am afraid to retire”. (Graffiti in Mexico City)
9. More and more, individual families are made responsible for their own care. The new neoliberal social protection mentions there are ‘many possibilities for new resources’, implying that it is workers that will have to provide them first! New tax revenues are mentioned, but are not meant to be used to tackle the growing inequality problem. (F. Mestrum) Is this surprising? Not really!****
****: Look at the International Monetary Fund: It has said that it ‘protects spending on education, health and social protection from cuts in its loan programs by setting social spending floors’. These measures are a welcome step forward, but are they effective? (and are they addressing HR needs?) No! An analysis of all 17 IMF loan programs for low- and middle-income countries during the first two years of the pandemic shows that these floors have been deeply inadequate, inconsistent, opaque and failing. They were little more than a fig leaf for what really ended up being harmful austerity measures that drove inequality, poverty, sustained HR violations and suffering. (Oxfam)
It is simply unacceptable for the IMF to perceive itself above human rights (Juan Pablo Bohoslavsky, Francisco Cantamutto)
10. The orthodox economic policies promoted by the IMF frequently have adverse, profound and lasting effects on the economic and social rights, as well as on the levels of inequality in the populations of the debtor countries. This, despite the unmovable fact that international HR law is also binding on the IMF (and its member states).
11. But the IMF (supported by its majority state partners), even today, refuses to be bound by HR obligations to the point that the very expression ‘human rights’ is prohibited from entering IMF documents. Still, the IMF is not shy about privileging the private property rights of some people over all HR of others.
Bottom line
12. Human rights can and do function as a method to achieve, even in highly complex and abstract fields, objectives and outcomes to tackle power imbalances that today enjoy broad consensus, i.e., reducing poverty, inequalities, and climate change. Human rights indeed have the potential and the mandate to challenge extreme inequalities, market fundamentalism, as well as environmental degradation, offering concrete and specific guidelines on the content of the economic policies that ought to be implemented. (J. P. Bohoslavsky, F. Cantamutto)
Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City
Your comments are welcome at schuftan@gmail.com