Human Rights as Anti-Imperial, Anti-Communist, Anti-authoriatarian postwar state

Human Rights as Anti-Imperial, Anti-Communist, Anti-authoriatarian postwar statecraft.

“No more (a) empires and (b) european wars, and (c) no more word wars (d) take adam smith’s advice, (e) end empires (f) create nation states (g) and organize them into federations. (h) the result should be peace and prosperity: the pax americana – and it worked.”

I think by the present generation the horrors of the world wars, the collapse of the british empire in particular and more broadly, europe, that resulted, was driving demand for ‘never again’ especially by americans who had viewed the warlike nature of european empires with disdain for a hundred and fifty years. (The same way americans vew the political decadence of europe at american expense today..)

The purpose of human rights in the 20th century was strategic and slightly dependent upon the theatre of operations:

The “Western demand for human rights” in the twentieth century functioned less as a single moral thesis than as a multi-use instrument whose strategic objective depended on the theater of competition.

1) External objective (Cold War): impose political costs on rival regimes without kinetic war

Human-rights language let Western states and publics shift competition onto the informational and legitimacy plane: treat dissident complaints as obligations violated, publicize violations, and thereby raise the Soviet bloc’s governance costs (repression, surveillance, censorship) while lowering the West’s costs of confrontation (because the “argument” becomes compliance with signed commitments rather than a bid for territory). The Helsinki “process” is the operational case: Basket III commitments became a durable hook for monitoring, naming, shaming, and organizing opposition inside the Eastern bloc.

2) System objective (post-1945 order): construct a common legitimacy language for Western leadership

After 1945, U.S.-backed “universal” human-rights talk supplied a portable standard usable across alliances, decolonization conflicts, and international institutions: it converted disputes over governance into disputes over compliance with norms, which is strategically useful for coalition maintenance and agenda-setting in global fora.

3) Internal objective (rule-of-law grammar): convert anti-parasitism constraints into enforceable “rights”

In the Natural Law Institute’s framing, “rights” are not metaphysical endowments; they are positive legal encodings of prohibitions—i.e., “prohibitions against parasitism can be positively expressed as contractual ‘rights’.” The strategic objective, in that grammar, is to force disputes into decidable, reciprocal, liability-bearing forms rather than discretionary rule. This aligns with the same document’s description of European strategy as sovereignty + reciprocity + rule-of-law/markets as a competitive adaptation mechanism.

4) 1970s “rights turn” objective (U.S. poli wartime shocks

“A separate, contingent objective in the late twentieth century (especially the 1970s) was domestic-political rehabilitation: human-rights policy provided a way to reframe U.S. foreign policy and restore confidence after Vietnam/Watergate-era credibility damage.” (This is a prominent thesis in the historiography).

Martin makes the common historiographic error of presuming a baseline that never existed, and a baseline today that is not superior to what did exist.
The anglosphere united the world in trade and communications and finance. This had uneven effects. But what it achieved was the near end of poverty worldwide. Just as the british ended slavery worldwide.

You can’t defeat the anglosphere on moral grounds, only on unpredicted externalities – which are not to be ignored, but corrected.