Globalization and human rights

By T. Mulya Lubis

JAKARTA (JP): Does culture matter? This question was raised by Abdullahi An-Naim, a highly acclaimed scholar of human rights from Sudan. The international community respected An-Naim's clarity and consistency in advocating universal rights, despite the fact that he comes from a traditionally conservative Islamic community himself.

Why is it so important to raise such a question again and again?

Because within the human rights community there has been a reluctance to again engage in cultural debate questioning the adherence to the notion of universality of human rights that in its nature must be cross-cultural and inter-cultural.

Engaging in such a debate would be regarded as a serious setback that might revive bitter tensions and conflicts between those conflicting notions of human rights.

Moreover, such a debate might open an avenue for repressive ideas together with a blanket cover up of violence and other forms of human rights violations.

Continuing human rights violations in South Africa, Sudan, Myanmar and other parts of the world serve as a fresh reminder to those who oppose seeing human rights from a cultural perspective.

When the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was being drafted immediately after World War II, a strong protest was lodged by the American Anthropologist Association. It said that universality of human rights was a nonsense. Rights must be culturally bound, and no rights exist without cultural affirmation.

Similar protests have been aired by various cultural communities around the world. In Asia as we know, the emergence of Asian values has been regarded as a rebirth of cultural domination of the perception of human rights.

Asian values have contributed to the so-called "Asian miracle" that facilitated several Asian countries to make economic leaps from developing economies into (nearly) industrialized ones, such as Taiwan, Hong Kong, South Korea, Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia.

However, the collapse of the Asian miracle has destroyed the mystique of Asian values whereby people started asking the question: hasn't it been an empirical fact of life that history of economic achievement was dictated by universal economic indicators?

The economic development in Europe and America has been a product of working achievement of similar economic indicators and measurement. Why economic development in Asia has not been the same as economic development in those two continents?

To contradict a cultural approach on one hand and universality approach on the other hand might be a futile exercise, however one must be able to clearly articulate a counter-cultural argument to the hegemony of cultural fundamentalism or of Asian values.

Therefore, it is not an overstatement that culture matters to globalization, to economic and social rights, and to civil and political rights because the very idea of rights is a cultural construct.

An-Naim is right when he says that human rights is not a culturally neutral concept. Human rights contents are also culturally conditioned. The institutions for implementing rights are culturally embedded. Both the force and appeal of rights and the resistance to that appeal are culturally imprinted. The problematic of culture's relevance is precisely that paradox: that the notion of rights is a cultural construct while its counter-forces are also culturally embedded.

Having said this, it does not mean that we should condone human rights violations since such a kind of practice in a number of cultural communities has cultural justification.

Violations of civil and political rights are indefensible.

Therefore, the question of Asian values, for instance, is not whether there are Asian values or what their relevance is to human rights in abstract but whose understanding of Asian values is taken seriously.

This is the time, perhaps, for statesmen, scholars and activists to reconsider their longtime position. Dictated by perpetual tension and conflict in human rights, they keep on contradicting cultural notion and universal notion of human rights. After all, our world is becoming one where cultural differences become less and less relevant.

As An-Naim says, our past mistake is to think of culture as merely being bound to locality, either regional or national. There is an emerging culture such as the global business culture, technology cultures and security cultures which are crossing borders.

The inevitable globalization of culture, whether we like it or not, must include the globalization of human rights culture. People, of course are rooted in their cultural communities, but they are also sharing values and institutions and dynamics globally.

The writer is a human rights activist and a corporate lawyer.