‘A statement against the totalitarian countries of Europe’: human rights and the early Cold War

Abstract

This article discusses scholarly views on the rise of the human rights paradigm. Based on a case study of the Netherlands it argues that the appeal of human rights cannot simply be attributed to the memory of the Holocaust, or the rise of post-war generations disillusioned with traditional ideologies in the 1960s and especially, the 1970s. Instead, it proposes that human rights primarily owe their popularity to the ideological contest of the Early Cold War, even though means to convey the message all over the world were only available in the decades that followed.

Notes

¹ Acts of the Dutch Parliament – Lower Chamber, Parliamentary year 1953–1954, (The Hague: Staatsdrukkerij en UItgeverij, 1954), 813.

² Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (London: Penguin, 2005); David Forsythe, Human Rights in International Relations, 3rd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Mark Mazower, “The Strange Triumph of Human Rights, 1933–1950,” The Historical Journal 47, no. 2 (2004): 386–8; Elisabeth Borgwaldt, A New Deal for the World: America’s Vision for Human Rights (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2005); Canon John Nurser, “The ‘Ecumenical Movement’ Churches, ‘Global order,’ and Human Rights: 1938–1948,” Human Rights Quarterly 25, no. 4 (2003): 841–81; Jean-Paul Lehners, “Pleading for a New History of Human Rights,” in The SAGE Handbook of Human Rights, Volume I, ed. Anja Mihr and Mark Gibney (London: Sage, 2014), 22–38, 31; Paul Gordon Lauren, The Evolution of Human Rights (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania University Press, 1996).

³ As discussed in Micheline Ishay, The History of Human Rights: From Ancient Times to the Globalization Era (Oakland: University of California Press, 2004), 7, 18, 28–9.

⁴ Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (London: Belknap-Harvard University Press, 2010), 5–7, 47.

⁵ Samuel Moyn, “The Future of Human Rights,” SUR – International Journal on Human Rights 20 (2014): 57–64, 60.

⁶ Jan Egeland, “Focus on Human Rights: Ineffective Big States, Potent Small States,” Journal of Peace Research 21, no. 3 (1984): 207–13 constitutes the classic text in this respect. See also Joris Voorhoeve, Peace, Profits and Principles: A Study of Dutch Foreign Policy (Leyden: Springer, 1979), 49–53; Peter R. Baehr, Fred Grünfeld, and Monique Castermans-Holleman, Human Rights in the Foreign Policy of the Netherlands (Antwerp: Intersentia, 2002); Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann, “Introduction: Genealogies of Human Rights,” in Human Rights in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 1–29, 21.

⁷ No doubt this is one of the reasons Jan Eckel included the Netherlands as a case in his Die Ambivalenz des Guten. Menschenrechte in der internationalen Politik seit den 1940ern (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2014).

⁸ See David Forsythe, Human Rights in International Relations, 3rd ed. (Cambridge; Cambridge University Press, 2012). On self-determination: Roland Burke, Decolonization and the Evolution of International Human Rights (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010).

⁹ Forsythe, Human Rights, 3.

¹⁰ Beatrice de Graaf, Over de muur (Amsterdam: Boom, 2004); Kate Hudson, CND – Now More So Than Ever: The Story of a Peace Movement (London: Vision Paperbacks/Satin, 2005).

¹¹ Moyn, “The Future,” 58; The Last Utopia, 25–7.

¹² Moyn, The Last Utopia, 151–6.

¹³ A scholarly biography of Van der Stoel is still lacking; brief biographical articles include Maarten Kuitenbrouwer, “Een Realistische Idealist. Max van der Stoel 1973–1977 en 1981–1982,” in De Nederlandse Ministers van Buitenlandse Zaken in de Twintigste Eeuw, ed. Duco Hellema, Bert van der Zwan, and Bob de Graaff (The Hague: SDU, 1999) 242–55.

¹⁴ Jonathan Israel, Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution from The Rights of Man to Robbespierre (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), cf. Mark Levene, Genocide in the Age of the Nation State: The Rise of the West and the Coming of Genocide (London: IB Tauris, 200–05) who, at 118, calls it a genocide. Owan Connelly, The Wars of the French Revolution and Napoleon 1792–1815 (New York: Routledge, 2006), 229.

¹⁵ H.H. Vik, “Taming the States: The American Law Institute and the ‘Statement of Essential Human Rights’,” Journal of Global History 7, no. 3 (2012): 461–82.

¹⁶ On the NAACP’s expectations and disappointment see Carol Anderson, Eyes off the Prize: The United Nations and the African-American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944–1955 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 30, 44.

¹⁷ Cf. Mark. Mazower, “The Strange Triumph of Human Rights, 1933–1950,” The Historical Journal 47, no. 2 (2004): 379–98, 381.

¹⁸ Daniel Sargent, A Superpower Transformed: The Remaking of American Foreign Relations in the 1970s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 98; also 69, 80, 95.

¹⁹ James N. Green, We Cannot Remain Silent: Opposition to the Brazilian Military Dictatorship in the United States (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2010).

²⁰ Daniel Thomas, The Helsinki Effect: International Norms, Human Rights, and the Demise of Communism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); Sarah B. Snyder, Human Rights Activism and the End of the Cold War: A Transnational History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).

²¹ Kathryn Sikkink, “Restructuring World Politics,” in Restructuring World Politics: Transnational Social Movements, Networks, and Norms, ed. Sanjeev Khagram, James Riker, and Kathryn Sikkink (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 301–17, 303. Similar views are expressed in Nicolas Guilhot, The Democracy Makers: Human Rights and International Order (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005); Barbara J. Keys, Reclaiming American Virtue: The Human Rights Revolution of the 1970s (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014); Snyder, Human Rights Activism.

²² Eckel, Die Ambivalenz des Guten, 48–64, 435.

²³ Anderson, Eyes off the Prize, 44–50; Carol Anderson, “‘A Hollow Mockery’: African Americans, White Supremacy, and the Development of Human Rights in the United States,” in Bringing Human Rights Home: A History of Human Rights in the United States, eds. Cynthia Soohoo, Martha F. Davis, and Catherine Albisa (Westport: Praeger 2009), 68–99, 80–1. Cf. Forsythe, Human Rights, 39. But see Dianne Kirby, “Divinely Sanctioned: The Anglo-American Cold War Alliance and the Defense of Western Civilization and Christianity, 1945–1948,” Journal of Contemporary History 35, no. 3 (2000): 385–412.

²⁴ Rasmus Mariager, Karl Molin, and Kjersti Brathagen, eds, Human Rights in Europe During the Cold War (London: Routledge, 2014). Compare Eckel, Die Ambivalenz des Guten, 110. For examples, see Giles Scott Smith and Hans Krabbendam, The Cultural Cold War in Western Europe 1945–1960 (London: Frank Cass, 2003); Giles Scott Smith, Interdoc (London: Palgrave-McMillan, 2012); Peter Finn and Petra Couvée, The Zhivago Affair: The Kremlin, the CIA, and the Battle over a Forbidden Book (New York: Random House, 2014); Alfred A. Reisch, Hot Books in the Cold War: The CIA-funded Secret Western Book Distribution Program behind the Iron Curtain (Budapest: CEU, 2013); Thomas Borstelmann, The Cold War and the Color Line: American Race Relations in the Global Arena (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001).

²⁵ Angela Romano, From Détente in Europe to European Détente: How the West Shaped the Helsinki Final Act (Brussels: Peter Lang, 2009); Andreas Wenger, Vojtech Mastny, and Christian Nuenlist, eds, Origins of the European Security System: The Helsinki Process Revisited, 1965–1975 (London: Routledge, 2008); Philipp Rock, Macht. Märkte und Moral. Zur Rolle der Menschenrechte in der Außenpolitik der Bundesrepublik in den Sechziger und Siebziger Jahren (Frankfurt/Main: Peter Lang, 2010); Floribert Baudet, “Het heeft onze aandacht.” Nederland en de rechten van de mens in Oost-Europa en Joegoslavië, 1972–1989 (Amsterdam: Boom, 2001). Compare Sara Lamberti, “Helsinki Disentangled (1973–1975): West-Germany, the Netherlands, the EPC and the Principle of the Protection of Human Rights” (PhD diss., Trento University, 2012). See for earlier examples Stephan Lehne, The Vienna Meeting of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, 1986–1989: A Turning Point in East-West Relations (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1991); James Goodby, Europe Undivided: The New Logic of Peace in US-Russian Relations (Washington DC: United States Institute of Peace Press, 1998).

²⁶ Eckel, Die Ambivalenz des Guten, 441.

²⁷ Maarten Kuitenbrouwer, “Nederland en de mensenrechten, 1795–1995,” in Geschiedenis van de mensenrechten. Bouwstenen voor een interdisciplinaire benadering, ed. Maarten Kuitenbrouwer and Marij Leenders (Hilversum: Verloren, 1997), 156–201.

²⁸ To a certain extent this also applied to the research school I was part of when I did my PhD. During class I had the strange experience of another PhD student proving the universality of human rights by comparing them to gravity.

²⁹ Barbara Oomen, Rights for Others: The Slow Home-coming of Human Rights in the Netherlands (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).

³⁰ Voorhoeve, Peace, Profits and Principles. Similar arguments were put forward by Peter R. Baehr, “The Foreign Policy of the Netherlands,” in The Other Powers: Studies in the Foreign Policies of Small States ed. Ronald P. Barston (London: Allen & Unwin, 1973), 61–9.

³¹ Baehr, Grünfeld, and Castermans-Holleman, Human Rights in the Foreign Policy of the Netherlands offers an English-language overview of Dutch scholarship up to 2001.

³² The first generation of human rights scholars included Theo van Boven, a former head of the UN’s human rights desk; Theo van Dijk who was a judge on the European Court, and Cees Flinterman and Fried van Hooff who were members of the UN’s human rights commission. Peter Baehr was the head of the Dutch government’s Academic Advisory Board and also served as the chairman of the Foreign Ministry’s Advisory Council on International Affairs. He was a founding member of the Dutch branch of Amnesty International and of the Netherlands Helsinki Committee.

³³ Eckel, Die Ambivalenz des Guten, 440–61, esp. 442.

³⁴ Niek Pas, Aan de wieg van het nieuwe Nederland. Nederland en de Algerijnse oorlog 1954–1962 (Amsterdam: Wereldbibliotheek, 2008); “De Algerijnse crisis vanuit Nederlands perspectief,” Internationale Spectator 62, no. 11 (2008): 592–6. Pas’s research seems to suggest that by 1959 an initial human rights-based approach to the Algerian War had given way to a more humanitarian one, that is the focus shifted away from outrage over torture and the denial of the Algerians’ right to self-determination toward concerns about lack of shelter and food for the oppressed. It was only then that Algeria temporarily achieved massive public attention. Even so, the official Dutch policy was to support France: Pas, “De Algerijnse crisis,” 595.

³⁵ Tienco de Goede, “De mensenrechten in het Nederlandse buitenlandse beleid ten aanzien van Spanje, Portugal en Griekenland, 1945–1975,” in Kuitenbrouwer and Leenders, Geschiedenis van de Mensenrechten, 227–58.

³⁶ Peter Malcontent, Op kruistocht in de Derde Wereld (Hilversum: Verloren, 1997), 171–2.

³⁷ The original text of proposal on self-determination was as follows: ‘The participating States recognize the inalienable right of every people, freely and with all due respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms, to choose, develop, adapt or change its political, economic, social or cultural system, without interference of any kind on the part of any State or group of states’: CSCE/II/A/8 (3 October 1973) in Human Rights, European Politics and the Helsinki Accord: The Documentary Evolution of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, 1973–1975. Volume III, ed. Igor Kavass and others (Buffalo, 1981), 121–2. For a discussion see Floribert Baudet, “It was Cold War and We Wanted to Win,” in Origins of the European Security System: The Helsinki Process Revisited, 1965–1975, ed. Andreas Wenger, Vojtech Mastny, and Christian Nuenlist (London: Routledge, 2008), 183–98, esp. 183–90.

³⁸ Stefan de Boer, Van Sharpeville tot Soweto (The Hague: SDU, 1999).

³⁹ Malcontent, Op kruistocht in de Derde Wereld; Marlies Glasius, Foreign Policy on Human Rights: Its Influence on Indonesia under Soeharto (Antwerp: Intersentia, 1999).

⁴⁰ Monique Castermans-Holleman, Het Nederlandse mensenrechtenbeleid in de Verenigde Naties (The Hague: Asser, 1992); Hilde Reiding, The Netherlands and the Development of International Human Rights Instruments (Antwerp: Intersentia, 2007).

⁴¹ www.delpher.nl (accessed 29 April 2015). For the decades between 1940 and 1990 queries into similar terminology had the following results: vrijheid van de geest, geestelijke vrijheid, or vrijheden (spiritual freedoms): 1,815; 985; 742; 685; 429; fundamentele vrijheden en grondrechten (fundamental freedoms; fundamental rights): 743, 814; 793; 1,538; 1,461. In all, human rights-related concepts produced 3,572; 5,292; 5,602; 15,108, and 27,000 hits. There may of course be some overlap. These numbers do not include references to specific rights. Religious freedom for instance had about 1,000 hits for each decade.

⁴² E.g., Bruce Schulman of Boston University, at the conference "Consigning the 1970s to History: a Global Perspective", Utrecht University, May 14, 2014.

⁴³ On this particular topic, see E. van den Berg, The Influence of Domestic NGOs on Dutch Human Rights Policy (Antwerp: Intersentia, 2000).

⁴⁴ Maarten Kuitenbrouwer, De ontdekking van de Derde Wereld. Beeldvorming en beleid in Nederland. 1950–1990 (The Hague: SDU, 1994); De Boer, Van Sharpeville tot Soweto; Malcontent, Op kruistocht in de Derde Wereld. The idea is based on R. Inglehart, The Silent Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977).

⁴⁵ Eckel, Die Ambivalenz des Guten, 440–61.

⁴⁶ National Archives, The Hague, 2.03.01, file 1280, undated note [early June 1948].

⁴⁷ Although Sikkink has shown that in 1953 around one third of the 110 international non-governmental organisations existing at the time focused on human rights; an additional 10 concentrated on women’s rights, their influence was fairly limited: Kathryn Sikkink and Jackie Smith, “Infrastructures for Change: Transnational Organizations, 1953–1993,” in Restructuring World Politics: Transnational Social Movements, Networks, and Norms, ed. Sanjeev Khagram, James Riker, and Kathryn Sikkink (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 22–44 at 24–25, 30.

⁴⁸ Baudet, “Het heeft onze aandacht”, ch. 2; Compare Lamberti, “Helsinki Disentangled.”

⁴⁹ Peter Malcontent and Floribert Baudet, “The Dutchman’s Burden? Nederland en de Internationale Rechtsorde in de Twintigste Eeuw,” in De Nederlandse Buitenlandse Politiek in de Twintigste Eeuw, ed. Duco Hellema, Bert van der Zwan, and Bob de Graaff (Amsterdam: Boom, 2003), 69–104.

⁵⁰ Lamberti, “Helsinki Disentangled.”

⁵¹ Chris van der Heijden, Dat nooit meer. De nasleep van de Tweede Wereldoorlog in Nederland (Antwerp: Contact, 2011), 329, 571–606; Dienke Hondius, Oorlogslessen. Onderwijs over de Oorlog sinds 1945 (Amsterdam: Bert Bakker, 2010), 285. Compare Moyn, The Last Utopia, 47, 82–3

⁵² Nele Beyens, Overgangspolitiek. De strijd om de macht in Nederland en Frankrijk na de Tweede Wereldoorlog (Amsterdam: Wereldbibliotheek, 2009), 270–1.

⁵³ See in more detail Floribert Baudet, “Conflicting Human Rights Theory and Practice in the 1950s: The Case of the Netherlands” (paper presented at 20th International Congress of Historical Sciences, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia, July 6, 2005; posted on academia.edu April 2014).

⁵⁴ National Archive, The Hague, 2.12.19, file 59, Rear-Admiral Van Holthe to Secretary of the Navy, MS3a/103/3/48 13 February 1948. Compare an earlier statement on the part of the (colonial) Netherlands Indies Government in: 2.105.302, file 104, Press Statement Netherlands Indies Government Information Service, no. AN 760, 13 December 1946.

⁵⁵ Baudet, “Het heeft onze aandacht”, 62–4, 93. Compare Baudet, ““It Was Cold War,” 192–3.

⁵⁶ National Archives, The Hague, 2.03.01, file 1280, undated note [early June 1948].

⁵⁷ Hondius, Oorlogslessen, 74–5, 79; Baudet, Het vierde wapen. Voorlichting, propaganda en volksweerbaarheid 1944–1953 (Amsterdam: Boom, 2013), 35–57, 88.

⁵⁸ National Archives, The Hague, 2.03.01, file 1280, undated note [early June 1948].

⁵⁹ National Archives, The Hague, 2.03.01, file 230, speech by Prime Minister Willem Drees, 5 May 1950.

⁶⁰ See Hans Daalder and Jelle Gaemers, Premier en elder statesman. Willem Drees 1886–1988. De jaren 1948–1988 (Amsterdam: Balans, 2014), 138.

⁶¹ Acts of the Dutch Parliament – Lower Chamber, Parliamentary year 1953–1954, item 3043 B5, 1 and 2.

⁶² Ibid., 831.

⁶³ Ibid., item 3043 B5, 1 and 2.

⁶⁴ Ibid., 813–15.

⁶⁵ Acts of the Dutch Parliament – Upper Chamber, Parliamentary year 1953–1954, 616–19.

⁶⁶ Ibid., 613, 615, 620.

⁶⁷ Acts of the Dutch Parliament – Lower Chamber, Parliamentary year 1953–1954, 817.

⁶⁸ Baudet, “Conflicting Human Rights Theory and Practice.”

⁶⁹ Marco Duranti, “Conservatism, Christian Democracy and the European Human Rights Project, 1945–1950” (PhD diss., Yale University, 2009).

⁷⁰ Andrew Moravcsik, “The Origins of Human Rights Regimes: Democratic Delegation in Post-War Europe,” International Organization 54, no. 2 (2000) 217–52.

⁷¹ Ann Deighton, “The British in Strasbourg: Negotiating the European Convention on Human Rights, 1950,” in Mariager, Molin, and Brathagen, eds, Human Rights in Europe during the Cold War, 26–41.

⁷² Moravcsik, “The Origins of Human Rights Regimes,” cf. Geoffrey Marston, “The United Kingdom’s Part in the Preparation of the European Convention on Human Rights, 1950,” International and Comparative Law Quarterly 42, no. 4 (1993): 796–826.

⁷³ Baudet, “Conflicting Human Rights Theory and Practice”; Moravcsik, “The Origins of Human Rights Regimes.” Cf., in general, Eckel, Die Ambivalenz des Guten, 163–5, 181–2, 804.

⁷⁴ Floribert Baudet, “The Ideological Equivalent of the Atomic Bomb,” Journal of Transatlantic Studies 9, no. 4 (2011): 269–81, 276; he was hardly alone in this. Cf. Baudet, Het vierde wapen, 152–154, 215–216.

⁷⁵ For example, De Militaire Spectator 119 (1950), 451; De Militaire Spectator 120 (1951) 47; Barend Koning, “De oorlog in Korea,” De Militaire Spectator 119 (1950) 617; De Militaire Spectator 120 (1951) 178; Koning, “De Strategie van de Koude Oorlog en zijn Bestrijding,” De Militaire Spectator 124 (1955) 389. Usually the references to foreign journals are incomplete but the inescapable conclusion is that they, too, engaged in the promotion of human rights.

⁷⁶ On transnational networks in general, see for instance, Thomas Risse, Stephen C. Ropp, and Kathryn Sikkink, eds, The Power of Human Rights: International Norms and Domestic Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); The Persistent Power of Human Rights: From Commitment to Compliance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). On their role in promoting human rights: Thomas, The Helsinki Effect; Snyder, Human Rights Activism.

⁷⁷ Moyn, The Last Utopia, 5.

⁷⁸ The argument is further elaborated in Baudet, “Conflicting Human Rights Theory and Practice.” See on Maritain and personalism: Samuel Moyn, “Personalism, Community and the Origin of Human Rights,” in Human Rights in the Twentieth Century, ed. Stefan L. Hoffmann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 85–106. Unfortunately as yet there is no monograph on the impact of personalism in the Netherlands and my conclusions on the subject must remain tentative for the time being.

⁷⁹ Geert Ruygers and Marga Klompé, eds, Met Pacem in Terris onderweg. Rapport van de Katholieke Vredesbeweging Pax Christi, afd. Nederland over de vrede in het atoomtijdperk (Nijmegen: Pax Christi, 1965). On the evolution of this traditional Catholic peace movement into an activist one see Niek Megens and Hilde Reiding, Bewegen binnen smalle marges. Pax Christi Nederland, 1965–1990 (Nijmegen: SUN, 1999).

⁸⁰ Karl Barth, Kirchliche Dogmatik III,4 (Zürich: EVZ, 1951) explores the actions of human beings in response to God’s Words. Paragraph 47 in particular discusses the subject of man’s relation to the challenges of the modern age.

⁸¹ Cf. De Graaf, Over de Muur.

⁸² See in more detail Pas, Nederland en de Algerijnse oorlog 1954–1962.

⁸³ Peter R. Baehr and Floribert Baudet, “Détente or Human Rights: The Netherlands and the Soviet Union,” in Baehr, Grünfeld, and Castermans-Holleman, Human Rights in the Foreign Policy of the Netherlands, 123–48, 143–5.

⁸⁴ See on this Malcontent, Op kruistocht in de Derde Wereld, 39–40; Baudet, “Het heeft onze aandacht”, 46–9, and more recently Daniel Sargent, “Oasis in the Desert? America’s Human Rights Rediscovery,” in The Breakthrough: Human Rights in the 1970s, ed. Jan Eckel and Samuel Moyn (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 125–45, 130.

⁸⁵ Acts of Parliament – Lower Chamber, Parliamentary year 1953–1954, item 3043 B5, 1 and 2.

⁸⁶ Eckel, Die Ambivalenz des Guten, 163–5, 181–2, 804, Deighton, “The British in Strasbourg,” 26–41.

⁸⁷ Baudet, “The Ideological Equivalent,” 269–81.