Beware those who sneer at 'human rights imperialism'

Guardian, At the height of the crackdown against the Hungarian uprising in 1956, Albert Camus warned French leftists not to allow political "expediency any precedence over regard for truth". The western left that ignored or, worse, justified the suffocation of Budapest, Camus thundered, "is in complete decadence, a prisoner of words, caught in its own vocabulary, capable of merely stereotyped replies, constantly at a loss when faced with the truth, from which it nevertheless claimed to derive its laws".

Today – with a century of catastrophic lapses in judgment in hindsight – too many western progressives are still trapped by the same "systematic relativism" that, in Camus's time as in ours, threatens no less than the "death of intelligence".

Take historian and journalist Stephen Kinzer's recent intervention against what he calls "human rights imperialism". Restaging one of the illiberal left's favourite shibboleths, he argues that the modern human rights movement has become "the vanguard of a new form of imperialism". Human rights groups, Kinzer sneers, are "spear-carrier[s] for the 'exceptionalist' belief that the west has a providential right to intervene wherever in the world it wishes".

Because it wields tremendous influence on the world stage, the human rights community should be closely examined to ensure compliance with its noble founding ideals. For example, the movement is reproached by many – and rightly so – for often subjecting free societies constitutionally committed to protecting citizens' rights to more exacting scrutiny than states genetically engineered for repression.

But Kinzer's critique of groups such as Human Rights Watch is of an altogether different variety. Although couched in the rhetoric of a world-weary pragmatism, Kinzer's challenge to human rights groups comes from a place of fundamental, philosophical hostility. The community, Kinzer claims, is mistakenly "promot[ing] an absolutist view of human rights permeated by modern western ideas that westerners mistakenly call 'universal'."

And worse, instead of focusing on "group rights", the human rights imperialists fetishise certain "secondary rights" such as free speech and political liberty. (Kinzer cleverly frames these as "the right to form a radical newspaper or an extremist political party".) When it comes to human rights in developing countries, Kinzer seems to be saying, individual rights are irrelevant. "The question should not be whether a particular leader or regime violates western-conceived standards of human rights," he says. "Instead, it should be whether a leader or regime, in totality, is making life better or worse for ordinary people."

At first sight, Kinzer's argument might strike some as eminently reasonable. After all, who would want to promote extremist political parties at the expense of economic development benefiting impoverished nations? But recall the unassailable fact that in the long term, those nations that have denied their citizens individual liberty in the name of collective prosperity have far more often than not failed miserably at delivering the latter. (The North Korean, Cuban and Zimbabwean economic miracles are not just around the corner.)

But it is Kinzer's extreme cultural relativism that makes his argument against the human rights community particularly troubling. For he is effectively implying that some people deserve fewer individual rights than others. There is no universal standard. And how dare the poor in underdeveloped and developing countries expect to speak their minds or fulfil their political aspirations – how egocentric of them to abdicate their historical destinies in favour of such narrow ends as reproductive rights and religious liberty.

Kinzer is clearly aware of the fact he is treading on dangerous ground and playing with ideas with toxic pedigrees. Perhaps it is for this reason that he is compelled to attach the predicate "western" to every individual right. Yet one wonders how he accounts for the myriad indigenous movements from the heart of the "east" (whatever that means) calling for freedom of speech and assembly, gender equity, LGBT rights, and so on. Are Iran's Green and Sudan's Girifna movements human rights imperialists? And pro-democracy Bahraini bloggers and Tunisian cyberactivists too?

Imagine what Kinzer's proposals would mean in practical terms. Can human rights activists be expected to ignore the plight of a woman being stoned in Iran for adultery or a journalist tortured in Mubarak's jails? ("Terribly sorry, but we wouldn't want to judge your oppressors by the meter of our culturally determined, imperialistic standards – tough!")

And consider, too, the impact of this brand of relativism on the moral imagination of the left, which, at its very best, stood firm on the principle that people divided by geography, culture and language can empathise with and express solidarity with each other.

If the isolationist, provincial left manages to convince us that the blessing of liberty is to be allocated randomly – along geographic lines and according to the accident of birth – will the heart still beat on the left?