Crimes Against Humanity. Essay #1 Outline

Prompt: What explains the simultaneous growth of human rights legislation and systematic efforts to deny universal rights after the French Revolution? Please consider nationalism in your answer. Thesis: ___________________________________________________ “The French Revolution, more than any other event, revealed that human rights have an inner logic. As the deputies faced the need to turn their loft ideas into specific laws, they inadvertently developed a kind of conceivability or thinkability scale … but sooner or later, it became clear that granting rights to some groups (Protestants, for example) was more easily imagined than granting them to others (women, for example).” (Hunt 150) “The logic of the process determined that as soon as a highly conceivable group came up for discussion (propertied males, Protestants), those in the same kind of category but located lower on the conceivability scale (propertyless males, Jews) would inevitably appear on the agenda.” (Hunt 150) “The status and rights of Protestants, Jews, free blacks, or women were determined in large measure by their place in the larger network of groups constituting the polity.” (Hunt 151) “Those who opposed granting rights to free men of color agreed on one central point with those who supported according to those rights: the rights of free men of color could not be separated from consideration of the slave system itself. Once those rights had been acknowledged, the next step became that much more inevitable.” (Hunt 164) - Saint Dominique and Toussaint-Louverture - Wordsworth: “Powers that will work for thee; act, earth, and skies” (166) - “Napoleon’s action retarded the definitive abolition of slavery in the French colonies until 1848” (167) (AFTER UDHR) “Rights did not disappear in either thought or action, but the discussions and decrees now transpired almost exclusively within specific national frameworks … talk of universally applicable natural rights subsided” (176) “Nationalism only gradually took over as the dominant framework for rights after 1815, with the fall of Napoleon and the final end of the Revolutionary era. Between 1789 and 1815, two different conceptions of authority warred with each other: the rights of man on one side and traditional hierarchical society on the other” (177) “By definition, the rights of “man” repudiated any idea that rights depended on nationality. Edmund Burke, on the other side, had tried to link hierarchical society to a certain conception of the nation, arguing that liberty could only be guaranteed by a government rooted in a nation’s history, with the emphasis on history. Rights only worked, he insisted, when they grew out of longstanding traditions and practices” (177) “The rights of man became entangled with imperialist aggression” (179) “The French Emperor [Napoleon] believed that ‘liberty is a need felt by a small class of people whom nature has endowed with nobler minds than the mass of men … Equality, on the other hand, pleases the masses” (180) Napoleon felt certain that ‘the prospect of a black republic is equally disturbing to the Spanish, the English, and the Americans” (180) “Over the course of the nineteenth century, nationalism overtook both sides of the revolutionary debates, transforming the discussion of rights and creating new kinds of hierarchy that ultimately threatened the traditional order” (181) “Human rights now depended on national self-determination” (183) “Once bursting with enthusiasm for securing rights through the spread of national selfdetermination, nationalism turned increasingly closed and defensive” (184) “The idea that Europe could be neatly divided into nation-states of relatively homogenous ethnicity and culture was belied by the linguistic map itself” (184) “The difficulty of creating or maintaining ethnic homogeneity contributed to the growing concern with immigration world-wide. Few objected to immigration before the 1860s, but it came under fire in the receiving countries by the 1880s and the 1890s.” (185) “After the French Revolution, it became increasingly difficult to simply reassert differences on the basis of tradition, custom, or history” (186) “... the sweeping claims about the natural equality of all mankind called forth equally global assertions about natural difference, producing a new kind of opponent to human rights” (187) “In these new biological doctrines, education or changes in environment could never change the inherent hierarchical structures in human nature” (187) “The establishment of universal male suffrage combined with the abolition of slavery and the beginning of mass immigration to make equality much more concrete and threatening” (192) “Imperialism further aggravated these developments” (192) “The Jews should be excluded from rights and even expelled from the nation because they were both too different and too powerful” (196) Socialism/Communism: “Man could only recover his authenticity by recognizing that human emancipation could not be achieved through politics; it required a revolution that focused on social relations and the abolition of private property” (199) (1) Introduction/ human rights legislation at the time - Briefly mention human rights legislation/pushes at the turn of the century - Role of Napoleon/ sort of follow him and his ideas in tandem with paper thesis (2) Domestic protection/superiority of WASPs (rich, property-owning, white, men) - Loss of Napoleon and his push for universal rights for French WASPs - Systematic denial of non-land-owning populations within the state - Hunt, reason why religious minorities/women/others are not awarded - Women: - “Women simply did not constitute a clearly separate and distinguishable political category before the [French] Revolution.” (Hunt 169) - “This neglect may have been due to the fact that women were not a persecuted minority. They were oppressed by our standards, and oppressed because of their sex, but they were not a minority, and certainly, no one was trying to get them to change their identity.” (Hunt 168) - “Despite this continual recalibration of the conceivability scale, equal rights for women remained unimaginable to almost everyone, men and women alike.” (Hunt 170) (3) Exceptionalism for human rights in Colonial Spheres/slavery - Napoleon’s exceptionalism for Saint Domínguez - Blacker’s Book Excerpt Weitz’s Ottoman Greece? Why be involved there/only care because it was Muslims targeting Christians? (4) Rights were only within National Frameworks/Nationalism - Nationalism section in Hunt - The establishment of nationalism/ clearly defined nation-states would guide the dialogue and conversation for human rights legislation - Why it was so dangerous to be Jewish in Europe, stateless population - (1948 - British Mandate for Palestine after Holocaust/Pressures) (5) Conclusion - → Overall, universal human rights fail/are systemically ruined because there are not any enforcement mechanisms, why should a state adhere to these policies if it will lessen their superiority/power as a ruling class? → especially in the colonial sphere/slavery