Abstract
Sarah Snyder’s engaging monograph grapples with some of the larger debates over the extent, uses, and abuses of the human rights campaigns of the 1960s and 1970s. These debates usually revolve around three areas of contention. The first is periodization: when can we talk with confidence about the existence of human rights as a concept and a concern in world history? Is it the 1940s? 1960s? 1970s? Or is it possible to date the emergence of human rights as early as the revolutionary era of the late eighteenth century, as Lynn Hunt has in her 2007 volume Inventing Human Rights? The second area of contestation concerns the universality of human rights advocacy: who fought for human rights where? Was it a global campaign, or a western construction founded on Enlightenment principles and the moral sensibilities of European thought? The third debate revolves around substance: how do we define human rights, which human rights campaigns are considered genuine, which ones are cynical or politically motivated, and most importantly, who gets to make those calls about authenticity?
Snyder engages primarily with the first of those debates, the question of periodization, though her position on chronology rests in part also on staking a claim in the third area of contestation, defining human rights. Her argument, articulated with refreshing clarity early in her introduction, is that Americans engaged in transnational human rights campaigns much earlier than previously assumed, namely in the 1960s. This engagement, she states, provided ‘the foundation for human rights activism’ (p. 1). She offers a revision to what she deems to be an overemphasis on the 1970s as the decade when human rights advocacy really came into its own, as has been argued by prominent scholars in the recent past. Among them are Sam Moyn who, in The Last Utopia (2010), has made a strong case for considering any human rights discourse prior to the 1970s as failed or misplaced, and Barbara Keys who, in her monograph Reclaiming American Virtue (2012), has made an equally strong case for interpreting the rise of human rights in the US as a political effort in the 1970s to reclaim a kind of moral high ground after the Vietnam debacle.
Snyder has structured her argument around particular defenders of the human rights cause in the United States and around particular causes that rose to prominence long before the Carter administration put human rights on the agenda. She identifies five case studies of American human rights activism in the late 1960s and early 1970s: the Soviet Union, Southern Rhodesia, Greece, South Korea, and Chile; and she uncovers in each of these campaigns traces of influence from the civil rights movement, including the direct involvement of prominent civil rights advocates. By closely examining the individuals involved in these human rights campaigns and the language they used, she is able to draw important connections between the civil rights movement and the emerging human rights agenda of the 1960s.
Snyder’s argument is convincing. She points to significant human rights activism throughout the decade of the 1960s, long before Carter puts it on his official foreign policy agenda. But the question lingers of how much her argument really overturns earlier findings. Snyder is able to make her case by redefining and expanding the definition of human rights, thus sidestepping rather than confronting the arguments of scholars who see the 1970s as the advent of human rights advocacy in the US. They differ primarily in how much influence and power they ascribe to human rights advocates outside the inner circle of the Washington power elite, and how one defines the concept of political elites in general.
At certain moments in the book, Snyder sets herself apart from previous scholars by tweaking the nuances of causation, rather than substantially redefining the terms of the debate. For instance, in the case of Southern Rhodesia, Snyder writes that earlier accounts had ‘framed U.S. policy toward Southern Rhodesia in terms of the Cold War, allied unity, and domestic political developments’, while she concludes that human rights were at the centre of the crisis, at least for ‘black Africans, nonstate actors seeking to influence U.S. policy, and American policymakers.’ (p. 44). Both positions have merit; and her interpretation does not necessarily negate the earlier one. Southern Rhodesia was not a simple case of either Cold War calculations or human rights concerns. Many activists and policymakers frequently used political expediency to achieve broader objectives, and all made decisions within the framework of the Cold War. Her argument would have been better served had she taken a more nuanced approach to the historical problem, acknowledging the impact of the Cold War (however limited) even as human rights advocates tried to overcome it.
The author succeeds in further clarifying the contours of the debates regarding the advent and substance of the human rights agenda in twentieth-century US politics, even if this monograph is not the last word in the debate. The concept of human rights has been notoriously malleable throughout history. Whether we see its origins in the eighteenth century or the 1970s, human rights served different political agendas and political constituencies. It has been imbued with moral altruism as well political expediency. Teasing out the precise relationship between the two, and embracing the contradictions inherent in any human rights campaign, remains the greatest challenge for the next generation of historians.