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【中文标题】人权之死
【原文标题】The end of human rights
【登载媒体】华盛顿邮报
【原文作者】Stephen Hopgood
【原文链接】http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-end-of-human-rights/2014/01/03/7f8fa83c-6742-11e3-ae56-22de072140a2_story.html
（点击查看大图）
当20世纪的反压迫浪潮逐渐退去，我们该回顾一下全世界的自由状况。
奥巴马总统在纳尔逊•曼德拉的葬礼上说：“在赢得真正的平等和普选权之后的斗争，或许不像在其之前的斗争那样具有戏剧性和泾渭分明的道德界限，但这更加重要。”联合国秘书长潘基文也敦促整个世界受曼德拉精神的“激励”，他说：“他的去世惊醒了整个世界，他是人权的火焰和希望的灯塔。”
他们传达的消息很明确：革命尚未成功，同志仍需努力。
但是在雄心勃勃、催人泪下的演讲背后，人权的根基在我们的脚下崩溃。如果我们看起来已经超越了“戏剧性和泾渭分明道德界限”的阶段，那么原因仅仅是我们不知道前进的方向。实际上，试验了150年的保护和捍卫人类权力，已经戛然而止了。
身边的证据俯拾皆是。中国的专制对人权发展的遏制，已经让这个新兴的超级势力变得完全反对普世人权价值。俄罗斯有过之而无不及，弗拉基米尔•普京阻止其公民享受合法的基本自由权利。从文莱的伊斯兰教立法到埃及的血腥军事政权（其对立面是彻底保守的穆斯林兄弟会），我们看到了无数抵制人权的行为和法律。
世界上最典型的压制人权的国家之一沙特阿拉伯，以异乎寻常的鲁莽举动，拒绝加入安理会，说联合国未能在全世界阻止“对权利的侵犯”。非洲领导人拒绝服从国际刑事法庭的权威。巴沙尔•阿萨德在政府使用化学武器杀害了数千人之后，继续加紧掌控叙利亚的权力。我们还看到，非洲、中东、东欧，以及现在的印度最高法院都对同性恋权利持极为保守的态度。当东南亚国家联盟兴高采烈地宣布，行使人权要受到“国家安全、公众秩序、公共健康、公共安全、公共道德，以及民主社会全体民众的福祉”的限制时，这显然是以社会保守主义的态度把人权作为交易的筹码，而并不是将其视为不可让渡的权利。
最新的皮尤调查结果显示，在同性恋的社会接纳程度上，西方国家与整个世界背道而驰。全世界每10个人中有8个人隶属于宗教团体，所有主要的保守类宗教信仰——基督教、伊斯兰教、印度教、犹太教——在社会和政治上的影响力不断增加，在这种背景下，西方世界和精英国度之外的发展中国家社会态度大幅度转化的可能性极为渺茫。自由之家的《世界自由》报告连续7年发现，很多被定性为“自由”的国家进步很小，退步很大。俄罗斯首当其冲，但并不孤独，尽管阿拉伯春天的呐喊声压倒了不少独裁政权。
自由之家呼吁美国和欧洲承担起更大的责任，但是美国连袖手旁观者也算不上。它用酷刑折磨基地组织嫌犯，在关塔那摩未经审判就限制人身自由，它使用无人机进行暗杀，拒绝国际犯罪法庭的判决，所有这一切都破坏了人权的基本理念和规范。
奥巴马政府早期的一些承诺依然没有兑现。总统在9月份的联合国大会上说，政治和安全的现实因素降低了美国单边主义的影响力，未来的和平与繁荣取决于国际和地区的合作伙伴。在一个把遏制中国当作首要任务的年代中，我们知道“合作伙伴”意味着什么——交易。东盟国家在短期内不会有机会得到总统的任何支持了。
当然，政府不可能把世界人权问题摆在首位，文化和宗教的差异性让现实世界中永远存在着独裁者和敌人。但这并非一朝一夕的变化，我们早已习惯了世界人权前进两步、后退一步的进展，因为我们都相信历史不会因正义而有所改变。奥巴马的曼德拉悼词中重要的假设是，目前最重要的挑战不是原则，而是执行。但是自由与宗教压迫和歧视之间的这场道德大戏一直持续到今天，即使我们已经把武装力量撤出了战场。
这种改变并非起始于90年代，亦非70年代和50年代，真正人权项目开始与1863年的欧洲国际红十字会，这是第一个致力于保护个人权利的永久性、现实中的国际组织。世界文明的自由人权思想传播早先经由帝国，后来通过20世纪的国际组织，但目前已经走入了死胡同。欧洲缓慢的政治退步在美国的掩护下已经历经多年，双方目前已经分道扬镳，亚太呼唤美国转向东方。本应在现实中存在、举世公认、无可非议的世界秩序却依赖于全世界国家是否有机会在人权问题上达成一致意见——这其实是不可能的。
首先一个变化是世界多极化。我们所见过的一个多极化的世界还是在一个世纪之前，现在，全球超级势力在迅速向亚洲转移，推动人权和国际正义的欧洲影响力在不断衰退。美国越来越像一个可以同富贵而不能共患难的人权朋友，它现在最关心的是中国和亚太地区的出口市场。新兴的超级势力金砖五国（巴西、俄罗斯、印度、中国、南非）并非一致反对人权——当然，俄罗斯和中国的人权记录极为糟糕——但他们要求在国际舞台上的话语权，并决定他们的合作对象。新兴势力在挑战当前的国际正义规则和人道主义干涉标准，他们通常认为这是胜利者的正义和政权的更迭。像联合国这种国际组织所依赖的全球规则并没有得到世界大多数人口的认可，人们看到的只是强权势力为他们和他们的盟友开脱寻找接口。新兴势力必将改变这一切——也为他们自己找到开脱的理由。
一个多极化的世界意味着更多的妥协——就像我们在叙利亚看到的、更多的互开方便之门，以及更少的有原则的谴责声音。美国已经不再对大多数人权协议采取怀疑的态度，因为国际权利似乎与华盛顿扩张民主的目标趋于一致。但反对者可以看到，美国对于强化国际权利解放机构——当然是贸易和金融领域之外的机构——犹豫不决。他们知道，如果风险太大，内部自然会形成一些阻力。
人权，让一个世俗化的欧洲脱离了宗教信仰，走向道德统一。但世界并没有走向这样的世俗化道路。如果说到变化，那么可以说它变得宗教色彩更浓了——这是第二个挑战。例如，在过去的一个世纪里，基督教逐渐向地球的南部转移，有超过60％的基督教徒生活在非洲、亚洲和拉丁美洲。我们还看到，中东、北非和南亚很多国家对伊斯兰教的信仰愈加虔诚。而我们也在热情的福音教士感染下，与美国和非洲的数百万人一起共享基督的福祉。
人权已经不再是权威和歧视的语言，而是抗议和拒绝的语言。在宗教的世界中，那种不知如何起源的现实人权与传统和上帝流传下来的、根深蒂固的文化倾向激烈竞争。当强大的信仰遭遇人权，经典的现代化理论——即世俗的权利必将战胜宗教——将不复存在。
多极化的世界、美国的优柔寡断、欧洲的衰败，加上来自宗教信仰团体的竞争，所有这一切让极为西方化、集中了资金的机构优势的人权模式遭受了巨大的压力。于是出现了一种矛盾。在人权和政治权利方面的进步。或许意味着其它领域的退步，比如社会正义和妇女权利。所有权利在我们脑海中的人权概念都是同等重要的。但是对于那些穷人、那些投身于社会主义政治的人，以及那些身陷宗教、保守的人来说，无论他们是否隶属于西方世界，决定哪种权利更重要，需要讨论和妥协，而不是来自纽约和日内瓦的勒令。
经典的人权守望策略是“点名羞辱”那些人权剥夺者，但这在某些场合并不适用，例如，一些本应受到羞辱的人认为伊斯兰教法的实施是极为必要的。在多极世界中，对恐怖暴力行为的正义或许意味着死刑，当然也可能意味着宽恕。在这个世界中，女人希望停止家庭暴力，让她们的女儿接受必要的教育，却同时生活在一个生育权利遭到限制的环境中。或者说，孩子们有权得到父母的养育，而不是作为他们的义务，这似乎触及到了最重要的社会机构——家庭——的核心价值。
在这个世界中，各类宗教团队都有机会在反对饥饿和反对压迫的斗争中扮演更重要的角色，远远超过世俗的发展和人权专家在过去几十年中发号施令的威力。《时代周刊》的年度人物教皇方济各曾经强调，教堂不是一个非政府组织，意思是说它要发挥比现实中的拥护行动更重要的作用。他说，教堂可以向民众传达更深奥、更有力、更引人和更重要的精神信息，他显然意识到，传统西方人权标准的式微无法与教堂的道德力量相提并论。新教皇对社会问题摆出的解放姿态以及对资本主义的抨击——毕竟他有机会动员十亿民众——或许让他成为根本性改变的契机，至少好过人权捍卫者的那些干巴巴的法律声明。
传统人权运动的一项成就是，认可每一个人在道德层面上都是平等的，这是一项伟大的功绩。但是，民族主义者、独裁者和传统的宗教人士对世俗人权理念和行为的抨击，让我们看到了另一种模式的人权，传统的人权——西方所散播的公民政治权利——只不过是其中的一部分。
我们已经从欧洲的世俗法律梦境中醒来，未来或许会出现一个世界性的宗教，也或许是一个永远自由、永远压迫的世界。全世界的中产阶级都在拼命地让自己，或者至少让他们的后代，从一个世界走向另一个世界。
原文：
When an icon of the 20th century’s strivings against oppression passes away, it is an appropriate time to take freedom’s audit.
“The struggles that follow the victory of formal equality and universal franchise may not be as filled with drama and moral clarity as those that came before,” President Obama said in his eulogy of Nelson Mandela last month, “but they are no less important.” And United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon urged the world to be “inspired” by Mandela’s spirit. “His death has awakened in all of us,” he said, “the flame of human rights and the beacon of hope.”
Their message was clear: We have come far, but there is a great deal left to do.
Yet despite this rhetoric of rededication and hope, the ground of human rights is crumbling beneath us. If we seem to have moved beyond “drama and moral clarity,” it is only because we no longer know where we are going. In fact, a 150-year experiment in creating global rules to protect and defend individual human beings is coming to an end.
The evidence is all around us. Authoritarian pushback against human rights in China raises the prospect of a new superpower utterly opposed to the hitherto dominant language of universal rights. And Russia, if anything, outdoes China, with Vladimir Putin manipulating his citizens’ legitimate aspirations for even basic freedoms. From the introduction of sharia law in Brunei to the consolidation of a murderous military regime in Egypt (where the alternative was the ultra-con servative Muslim Brotherhood), we see examples everywhere of resistance to human rights, in practice and in principle.
In a stupefying act of bravado, Saudi Arabia, one of the world’s most systematic abusers of human rights, rejected its seat on the Security Council, saying the United Nations fails to prevent “the violation of rights” around the world. African leaders resist the authority of the International Criminal Court. Bashar al-Assad strengthens his grip on power in Syria after his regime uses chemical weapons to murder thousands. We see extreme con servatism on gay rights throughout Africa, the Middle East, Eastern Europe and now on India’s Supreme Court. And when the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) declares, seemingly in earnest, that the exercise of human rights may be limited by “the just requirements of national security, public order, public health, public safety, public morality, as well as the general welfare of the peoples in a democratic society,” that is a mandate for executive power and social conservatism, not for inalienable rights.
A recent Pew Global Attitudes survey highlighted “the global divide” that splits the West from the rest on social acceptance of homosexuality. In a world where eight in 10 people identify with a religious group, and where conservative forms of all major faiths — Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Judaism — are increasingly prominent and politically salient, the outlook for radical change in social attitudes outside the West and elite enclaves in developing countries looks bleak. For the seventh consecutive year, Freedom House’s “Freedom in the World” report found more declines than gains in the number of countries rated “free.” Russia led the way in repression but was hardly unique, as the green shoots of the Arab Spring led to widespread authoritarian retrenchment.
Freedom House called on the United States and Europe to do more. But the United States is worse than an ambivalent onlooker. Its use of torture and rendition against al-Qaeda suspects, its detentions without trial at Guantanamo, its drone program and targeted assassinations, and its rejection of the International Criminal Court all undermine the very idea, let alone the practice, of human rights.
Even the early promise of the Obama administration has dimmed. Political and security realities have reduced the scope of American unilateralism, the president admitted in his address to the U.N. General Assembly in September. The future, he said, will be about international and regional partners for peace and prosperity. In an era when containing China is paramount, we know what “partners” means: deals. No ASEAN state should expect a call from the president about human rights anytime soon.
Of course, governments have always been reluctant to tie their hands with human rights considerations, and cultural and religious diversity guarantees that the secular global rights regime will always have detractors and foes. But this is more than a transient change. We have taken the two-steps-forward, one-step-back nature of human rights for granted, assuming that the arc of history does indeed bend toward justice. The assumption underlying Obama’s Mandela eulogy is that matters of compliance, not principle, are the main challenge remaining. But the great moral drama of liberal freedoms vs. state and religious repression and discrimination is alive and insistent today, even as we are in a forced retreat from the battlefield.
This isn’t just a change from the 1990s, the 1970s or even the 1950s. It is the end of a historic project that began in Europe in 1863 with the International Committee of the Red Cross, the first permanent, secular, international organization dedicated to the protection of the suffering individual. The export of a liberal-humanist vision of global civilization, first through empire and then via the 20th century’s international institutions, has reached an impasse. Europe’s slow political decline has been disguised for decades by American power. Now the two are diverging, the Asia-Pacific calling Americans to turn East. The world in which global rules were assumed to be secular, universal and nonnegotiable rested on the presumption of a deep worldwide consensus about human rights — but this consensus is illusory.
The first challenge is multipolarity. It’s been more than a century since we’ve lived in a truly multipolar world. Now, as power shifts rapidly to Asia, the influence of Europe, so often the driving force for human rights and international justice, has waned. The United States has proved a fair-weather friend for human rights abroad and is now far more interested in China and its own export markets in Asia and the Pacific. The new and re-emerging powers known as the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) are not uniformly against human rights — although the records of Russia and China are abysmal — but they will increasingly want a say on global rules and who gets to set them. Newly emerging states are challenging settled opinion on transnational justice and humanitarian intervention, which they often interpret as victor’s justice and regime change. And the global rules and principles that organizations such as the United Nations rely on were not written by the vast majority of the world’s peoples, who have long seen powerful states declare exceptions for themselves and their allies. Newly powerful states will challenge this system — and seek exceptions of their own.
A multipolar world means more compromise — as we already see in Syria — more back-scratching and less principled denunciation. America’s notorious skepticism about most human rights treaties has in the past been tempered because international rights seemed to go hand in hand with Washington’s goal of spreading democracy. But opponents can now see U.S. ambivalence about strengthening global liberal institutions — outside the trade and finance realm — and know there will be little pushback when the stakes are high.
Human rights made sense for a secularizing Europe that sought a moral alternative to religious faith. But the world has not followed the secular path. If anything, it is becoming more intense in its religiosity — that is the second challenge. Over the past century, for example, Christianity has seen a massive shift toward the south, with more than 60 percent of Christians now living in Africa, Asia and Latin America. In Africa alone, the number of Christians rose from 9 million to 516 million between 1910 and 2010. And we are as aware of the intensity of Islamic faith held by millions in many of the countries of the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia as we are of the passionate evangelism shared by millions of Christians in the Americas and Africa particularly.
The language of human rights is a language of protest and resistance, not of authority and discrimination. In a religious world, secular human rights of recent heritage and ambiguous origin increasingly compete with long-standing cultural claims legitimated by traditions and gods. Where strong faith meets human rights, the classic modernizing assumption — that secular rights trump religion — no longer holds.
A more multipolar world, America’s ambivalence, Europe’s decline and more competition from faith-based movements — all these forces put extreme pressure on a human rights model that is heavily Westernized and centralized in funding and organization. And so a paradox emerges. Achieving progress in civil and political rights, for example, might mean ceding ground in other areas such as social justice and women’s rights. All rights are equally important to the global human rights regime with which we are familiar. But for many of those who are poor, or committed to socialist politics, or deeply religious and/or conservative, both inside and outside the West, which rights deserve primacy requires discussion and compromise, not diktats from New York and Geneva.
The classic Human Rights Watch strategy of “naming and shaming” rights abusers is irrelevant in cases where, for example, the imposition of sharia law is considered desirable by those who must be shamed for change to happen. In the multipolar world, justice for acts of egregious violence may mean the death penalty — or it may mean outright forgiveness. This world may be one where women seeking an end to domestic violence and desirous of education for their daughters nevertheless oppose reproductive rights on principle. Or where the idea that children have rights they can claim against their parents, rather than obligations, seems to strike at the heart of the most valued social institution of all, the family.
In this world, religious groups of all kinds have an opportunity to play a greater role in struggles for freedom from hunger and repression than they have done in the decades when secular experts in development and human rights held sway. Pope Francis, Time magazine’s “Person of the Year,” has insisted that the church is not a nongovernmental organization — meaning it has more to offer than secular activism and advocacy. The church has a deeper, more powerful, more attractive and more important spiritual message to spread, he has said, surely recognizing that the weak grip of conventional Western human rights principles in individual communities is no match for the moral power of the church. The new pope’s seemingly more liberal stances on social issues and his critique of capitalism may make him a better bet for radical change — he can in principle mobilize a billion people — than the rather arid, dry and legalistic claims of secular human rights advocates.
What the classical human rights movement has achieved is the recognition of each human being as the moral equal of all others. This is a massive feat. But the nationalist, authoritarian and conservative-religious backlash against the language and practices of secular human rights opens the need for alternative forms of mobilization, of which conventional human rights — meaning civil and political rights diffused from the West — will be just one part.
We are waking from the European dream of one world under global, secular law. The result may be a reinvigorated universal church. Or it may be parallel and permanent zones of freedom and zones of repression, and a global middle class seeking desperately to move themselves, or at least their children, from one to another.
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发表于 2014-4-8 09:26
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