Great illusions or great transformations? Human rights and international relations a hundred years on
| Published date | 01 June 2019 |
| Date | 01 June 2019 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0047117819851256 |
| Subject Matter | Part Two: Norms and Process |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0047117819851256
International Relations
2019, Vol. 33(2) 338 –356
© The Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/0047117819851256
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Great illusions or great
transformations? Human rights
and international relations a
hundred years on
Tim Dunne
The University of Queensland
Nicholas J Wheeler
University of Birmingham
Abstract
Human rights have been in the practice of international relations, but they have not been central
to academic thinking on International Relations (IR) for most of the century since the discipline
became institutionalized in 1919. We suggest two related reasons for this relative neglect by the IR
community. First, the US heartland of IR prioritized other institutions of international order during
the 1950s and 1960s, primarily the balance of power, diplomacy, and arms control. Second, human
rights were treated with suspicion by realists in particular given their view that morality in foreign
policy was potentially disruptive of international order. If the emergent discipline of IR largely
ignored the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, so did the rest of the world according
to the revisionist history of human rights offered by Samuel Moyn. He challenges the idea that
the birth of the regime was the culmination of a 150-year struggle that began in the minds of
Enlightenment thinkers and ended with a new globalized framework of rights for all. While IR was
slow to come to human rights, the pace in the last three decades has quickened considerably; the
area of protecting the basic right of security from violence being a case in point, where several IR
scholars have been pivotal in the development of action-guiding theory. Developing a critical theme
in Carr’s The Twenty Years’ Crisis 1919-1939, we consider whether these institutional developments
represent great illusions or great transformations in international relations in Carr’s terms.
Keywords
basic rights, Helsinki process, human rights, realism, Universal Declaration of Human Rights, utopia
Corresponding author:
Tim Dunne, School of Political Science and International Studies, The University of Queensland, 4072,
Brisbane, QLD, Australia.
Email: tim.dunne@uq.edu.au
851256IRE0010.1177/0047117819851256International RelationsDunne and Wheeler
research-article2019
Article
Dunne and Wheeler 339
‘Ethics must be interpreted in terms of politics; and the search for an ethical norm outside
politics is doomed to frustration’.1 This insight by E.H. Carr, in his classic The Twenty
Years’ Crisis 1919-1939, captures the troubled entanglement of human rights norms in
international politics. Carr’s idea of a constant tension between realism and utopianism is
helpful to understand why human rights have become a powerful symbol of an emerging
cosmopolitan community that seeks to protect individuals from avoidable harms, irre-
spective of considerations of identity or statehood. At the same time, we must acknowl-
edge that the combined impact of all the human rights proclamations, declarations,
conventions, and resolutions has fallen well short of the hopes of countless intellectuals
and activists; for them, the human rights regime has failed the millions of victims of
human wrongs.2 Such an observation takes us back to our earlier work on human rights in
the 1990s.3 As we sought to evaluate whether intervention for humanitarian purposes was
becoming a legitimate practice in international society, we were often reminded of inter-
national society’s moral failures. All these declarations ‘yet the bodies keep piling up’.4
Human rights in IR
Human rights have been a central part of the story of international relations for most of
the last one hundred years, but arguably they have only been squarely in International
Relations (IR) since the 1980s; the first book length treatment of the subject that had a
significant impact on the field did not appear until 1986 when R.J. Vincent published
Human Rights and International Relations.5 This could lead one to arrive at the prema-
ture and incorrect conclusion that IR is a backward discipline with respect to the evolu-
tion of human rights theory and practice. Instead, we argue that this relative silence is
indicative of the fact that the major figures of IR, during the Cold War in particular, were
drawn to issues and questions that they believed to be a higher priority than human
rights. One way of expressing this priority is in terms of the importance – to theorists like
Hans J. Morgenthau, John Herz, and Martin Wight – of primary institutions such as the
balance of power, diplomacy, great power management, limited war, and international
law. Secondary institutions such as the organs of the United Nations and the evolving
human rights regime were seen as peripheral to the challenge of managing nuclear order
between the superpowers.
Historians came even later to the study of human rights; only in the last decade or so
have historians writing about world history made the turn away from national and impe-
rial histories towards historicizing the international. However, historians like Mark
Mazower have subsequently emphasized the limited impact of human rights. Writing in
the context of the League of Nations, Mazower reminds us that Japan famously fought
and lost a diplomatic battle with the major powers to have the principle of racial equality
included in the Covenant.6 Minority rights had a different fate. They were ‘guaranteed’
by the League as a condition of the international recognition of the successor states in
Central and Eastern Europe. In reality, these minority protections were at best half-
hearted, as the Great Powers had no desire to weaken the new states that they had brought
into existence, and the rise of Nazism ended this experiment when Hitler’s Germany
used the rationale of protecting German-speaking ethnic minorities to justify territorial
annexations.
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