Human Rights, People’s Sovereignty & National Sovereignty The South Asian Way

By Dayan Jayatilleka

(May 05, Singapore City, Sri Lanka Guardian) The concept of human rights is damaged, discredited and rendered less effective by those who deploy it as part of a discourse that urges surrender of national sovereignty and is nihilistic towards the nation. The attack on national sovereignty and the nation-state proceeds by way of a number of false arguments and suggestions. One is that there is an all powerful global revolution which is enthroning human rights.The sub-text is that the Third World states in general and the Sri Lankan state in particular, or indeed the state in the abstract, can run but it cannot hide, and will be dismantled or driven to the margin while the sovereign individual, supported or represented by an omnipresent and omniscient international human rights regime, reigns. The second suggestion is that people’s sovereignty can triumph at the expense of national and state sovereignty. This was the argument used after the WMD excuse collapsed, to justify the invasion of Iraq. What is particularly insidious about this suggestion is that the people are sought to be shorn of the nation state and brought under the protection of a transnational network which is heavily weighted in the interests of the world’s powerful.

Not only are these propositions untrue, they are part of an ideological discourse representative of a political stance and project which is damaging to the peoples. This discourse of salvation ‘from above and beyond’, also diverts the citizenry from a necessary nationally–driven people’s project to safeguard and expand human rights and civil liberties; a pathway exemplified by India, the Maldives and just recently Pakistan.

There is indeed a human rights revolution and that is all to the good, but it is questionable whether History moves in any one direction. The notion of a triumphant march of Enlightenment rationality is a meta-narrative that has been called seriously into question. There is no single arrow of History that points in a single direction. It is far more likely that there are several directional thrusts, depending on the geographical space and period of time one is examining. It is difficult to identify one as more powerful than all others, all the time, notwithstanding a vulgar neo-Hegelianism (‘expanding human freedom’). While Fukuyama was correct when he argued that liberal democracy no longer has a global competitor posing a universalist challenge or laying claim to being a universalist alternative, it is certainly ludicrous to posit a human rights revolution that is sweeping all before it.

I am not and have never been an advocate of cultural relativism. The universality of the human condition renders human rights universal, but this is not the only reality around. The particular is as Real as the universal, and therefore the universal develops, unfolds and is applicable only through the mediation of the concretely particular and only with degrees of unevenness and differentiation. (‘Absolutely everything develops unevenly’ said Mao). There are other forces, factors and tendencies that go to make up current world history and the world order. Some phenomena are far older than the laudable values of individual liberty. Historians of the long term argue that the world system has been in existence for almost 5,000 years, with its shifting cores and peripheries but with a continuity of inequity and exploitation. Furthermore, for better or worse, the sense of ‘nation’ of the peoples of China and Vietnam to name just two, is far older than that of human rights and will possibly outlive its present form. This is probably true of the Sinhalese.

Put together, one may see that the spirit of a nation or a community’s sense of collective existence in a given space, a sense of a proto-state, an organic striving for unity and resistance to anything felt to be centrifugal or an imposition, an assertion and defence of an irreducible space within an iniquitous and ubiquitous world system, may be far older, deeper and therefore existentially more powerful than any ‘global human rights revolution’. This is never more so than when the collective feel itself culturally and historically unique to a small space and its own state therefore becomes even more of an existential imperative than for a large and far flung cultural formation. This is the case with the Sinhala nation and it is legitimate. It exceeds the bounds of legitimacy only when the sense of uniqueness becomes a sense of superiority or self sufficiency and proves impossible to accommodate under a broader umbrella with the collective identity of others who share the same space (while having a presence beyond), except upon conferral of de-jure dominance, superseding de facto preponderance.

The ‘human rights imperialist’ (Hobsbawm) discourse peddled by ‘human rights compradors’ is a corollary of the economic doctrine on neo-liberalism and free market fundamentalism, which sought to roll back the state, except for that of the hegemonic powers. The project was a globalised Weberianism: one state or bloc would monopolise the legitimate use of force in the global space. The high point of this doctrine was the ‘uni-polar moment’, encompassing the fall of the USSR, the Gulf War and the invasion of Iraq. This doctrine has since been challenged, resisted and rolled back. Both in the economy and in politics, the state is back in, be it in a regulatory role or in conceptual terms such as that of sovereignty. In some parts of the world, such as East Asia, the neoliberal human rights discourse never caught on and was ideologically countervailed. Today, with the Asian economic success centred on China, those East Asian thinkers (Kishore Mahbubani to name one) are amused by the Western liberal discourse, pointing out that liberalism and democracy are not only not coterminous, they evolved incrementally in the North/West in tandem with certain levels of socioeconomic development which are only recently being approximated by the East (and the South).

In other parts of the globe, human rights are viewed not as in the Western (or the Lankan) liberal perspective, but with an equal emphasis accorded social or collective rights. In still other societies, collective rights are given greater weight, making for more Rousseau-esque democracies (I refer mainly to Latin America today). Others combine respect for international law with a renewed emphasis on sovereignty, which is why Moscow has coined the term ‘sovereign democracy’ to distinguish it from a discourse that erodes sovereignty. India recognises human rights in their individual and collective dimension and is a liberal democracy, but rightly rejects the erosion of sovereignty (and the misuse of ‘self determination’).

Even in Western liberal democracies the picture is blurred. While national courts have acted on the doctrine of universal jurisdiction, a brave pioneer of this brave new world, Judge Baltazar Garzon of Spain has found himself charged by his country’s judiciary because he sought to re-open the matter of human rights abuses during the Spanish Civil War. That conflict involving atrocities by fascist troops and excesses by Republicans, made Sri Lanka’s own war look like a human rights picnic — but there had been a moratorium and amnesty as part of the domestic process of democratisation and stabilisation, which Judge Garzon in his zealous overestimation of the supremacy of the new zeitgeist over the national state, had violated to his own cost.

Thus there are a great number of variations, giving the lie to a uni-linear trend which is resisted by Sri Lanka. The reality is also that whatever the additions to the architecture of the international order which have resulted in the relative erosion of the classic version of sovereignty, the cornerstone of the international system and international law remain non-interference in the internal/domestic affairs of sovereign states, while the core of sovereignty itself- the power of decision over war and peace—remains with the state, though ultimately rooted in the people.

In a sleight of hand, these neoliberal ideologues attempt to conflate human rights with people’s sovereignty and reduce national sovereignty to state sovereignty. People’s sovereignty is then laid at the altar of the quasi-myth of the redemption of the individual citizen from the national state by a supranational process which virtually abolishes national sovereignty—except for the untrammelled national sovereignty of the imperial state. In this reading, the local Leviathan, preying on the citizen, is thus brushed aside by a global Leviathan.

This is pernicious and dangerous nonsense. The state provides the citizenry with the minimum of protection in the face of the prospect of armed anarchy - a Hobbesian argument to be sure, but the validity of which we in Sri Lanka experienced in the face of the neo-barbarian uprisings of the JVP and LTTE. No state, no prospect of the exercise of people’s sovereignty (at elections). If however the state becomes the main obstacle to the exercise of the sovereignty of the people, the people retain the right of resistance and rebellion, and inasmuch as there is no other recourse, the exercise of that right even in armed form is legitimate – an argument that finds acceptance in Locke and later, the Founding Fathers but dates back to the Old Testament. While decidedly and unambiguously true, this has little relevance to the Sri Lankan case today inasmuch as it is fundamentally a democratic state, i.e. a state in which the people are sovereign, in the ultimate sense of deciding in whom to vest the power of decision.

Just as in its internal dimension the state ensures the minimum conditions for the exercise of people’s sovereignty, in its external dimension, in a global space of the powerful and the predatory, the state provides the people with the conditions of their political existence. The Sri Lankan people exist as a sovereign people in the world system, in, through and because of the state! Without a Sri Lankan state there would be no sovereign Sri Lankan people, only a vassal people of this or that imperial or neo-colonial power. The Sri Lankan citizen exists as a sovereign citizen because of the existence of the Sri Lankan state. This is why there is no contradiction, and there cannot be one, between people’s sovereignty and national sovereignty, and national sovereignty and state sovereignty. This is why any attempt to pit one against the other; use arguments in favour of people’s sovereignty to undermine national and state sovereignty, and to set the individual citizen on the side of any practice, network or entity that undermines national and state sovereignty, must be rejected for the conjurer’s trickery that it is, while every attempt at expanding the rights of the citizen and the sovereignty of the people even in relation to the state, must take place within a project that respects and recognises the value of national and state sovereignty, not one that attempts to undermine and erode them. This is why the great Gramsci never set the ‘popular’ against the ‘national’ or either against the ‘democratic’, and indeed argued for a strategy and a historical bloc that was ‘national- popular’.

Does my perspective leave the individual citizen naked in the face of the state? The abiding example of India and the recent experiences in South Asia amount to a resounding ‘No’. India fought its battle during Indira’s Emergency and won. Never again have rights been allowed to be rolled back arbitrarily by the state, but at no time has the battle for the defence of rights been at the expense of India’s sovereignty. Just recently in Pakistan, a huge reformist shift, a drastic democratisation of the Constitution has taken place peacefully, propelled by the national higher judiciary, civil society, and the mainline political parties (Government and Opposition). There was no ‘international human rights regime’ involved. In the Maldives, a prolonged authoritarianism was rolled back by a young educated modern political leader who is now President. The Maldives, a society with an Islamic majority, seems to have a state with more liberal and tolerant views than the far older democracy Sri Lanka (judging by the Akon affair). All these examples point to a path for the defence of democracy that is other than that of international interference and intervention. This is the path of internal democratisation through political, social, and ideological struggle by individuals and collectives, with international support and solidarity, but do not entail recommending or rejoicing at the erosion of national and state sovereignty. They are confirmation of the Gramscian strategy of emancipation which bundles the popular, the democratic and the national, rejecting the ‘cosmopolitan’ in favour of the ‘internationalist’.