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PERSPECTIVES

ON GLOBAL
DEVELOPMENT
AND
TEC HNOLOGY
PGDT 9 (2010) 28-38 brill.nl/pgdt

Rethinking Human Rights, Development, and


Democracy: The Paradox of the UN

Mark Frezzo
Assistant Professor of Sociology; Assistant Director of Peace Studies
Florida Atlantic University
E-mail: mfrezzo@fau.edu

Abstract
Building on a world-historical analysis of post-Fordism, the communications revolution, neolib-
eralism, and the changing status of the United Nations Organization (UN), this article contex-
tualizes three prominent disputes in the academic field of global studies: the debate on the
definition, scope, and applicability of human rights; the debate on the successes and failures of
the development project; and the debate on the origins, evolution, and future of global gover-
nance. In the process, this article argues that the existence of separate literatures on human
rights, development, and global governance has obscured a significant and troubling question:
How might one intervene in the process of transferring state-functions to the global and local
levels? Cutting across the boundary between international relations (with its emphasis on the
evolution of the interstate system) and macro-historical sociology (with its focus on the evolu-
tion of the world-economy and global society), this normative question is consistent with the
mission of global studies—a domain that rejects both value-neutrality and its polar opposite,
cultural relativism in favor of such normative concerns as “equality” and “justice.” In addition,
this question has been posed not only by a spectrum of social movements, the Zapatista Solidar-
ity Network, and the World Social Forum (WSF), but also in such NGOs as Amnesty Interna-
tional and Human Rights Watch and, even more surprisingly, in the UN—the most prominent
offshoot of US hegemony and the centerpiece of the global governance system. The paradoxical
status of the UN as both an ostensible advocate of participatory democracy and the fulcrum of
a hierarchical interstate system is symptomatic of a sea change in the contemporary world.

Keywords
human rights, development, global governance, United Nations

Critical Cosmopolitanism
In the last twenty years, a dense sequence of events—including the revolutions
in Eastern Europe and the concomitant collapse of the Soviet Union, the frac-
turing of Yugoslavia, the end of Apartheid in South Africa, the genocide in
Rwanda, the spread of political Islam, a wave of financial crises (sweeping
© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2010 DOI: 10.1163/156914910X487889
M. Frezzo / PGDT 9 (2010) 28-38 29

across East Asia, Russia, Latin America, and ultimately the global North), and
a proliferation of social movements challenging the neoliberal prescriptions of
the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank (WB), and the
World Trade Organization (WTO)—has prompted scholars to rethink the
meaning of human rights, the legacy of development, and the architecture
of the global governance system.1 Amidst dramatic changes in the world-
economy, the interstate system, and global society, a critical mood has
descended upon the university systems of the global North. Notwithstanding
the influential post-modernist challenge to the emancipatory vision of the
Enlightenment, scholars in the social sciences and the humanities alike have
taken a renewed interest not only in Kant’s celebration of the “cosmopolitan
ethic” and proposal for “perpetual peace,” but also in Marx’s critique of politi-
cal economy, post-colonial studies, and global feminism. Prominent examples
of the critical turn in scholarship include the sociology of human rights and
critical globalization studies. These approaches merit further elucidation—not
least because they testify to the inextricability of human rights, development,
and global governance.
In the spirit of critical cosmopolitanism, sociologists have joined political
scientists, legal scholars, and philosophers in debating the nature, scope, and
applicability of human rights.2 In accordance with their training, sociologists
explore not only the social conditions under which human rights legislation is
drafted, interpreted, enforced, and violated, but also the relationship between
the human rights canon and programs designed to implement human rights.
In addition, sociologists examine how the conferral of rights influences the
behavior of societies, communities, and individuals. In the process of explain-
ing how rights—understood as claims made on national governments and
other institutions—‘circulate’ among different actors, sociologists pose a series
of questions. First, how has the human rights canon—understood as a collec-
tion of proclamations, laws, scholarly texts, and common wisdom—evolved
from ancient times to the present day? Second, how have social movements,
NGOs, and IGOs promoted human rights? Third, what is the connection

1
Scholars defining themselves as “cosmopolitan social democrats”—and drawing on the
intertwined legacies of Kantian moral philosophy and European social democracy—have joined
activists, public intellectuals, and NGO staff in calling for the creation of a new global gover-
nance framework (Archibugi 2003; Held 2004; Fabian Society 2005; Falk 2009).
2
In essence, the Human Rights Section of the American Sociological Association (ASA) and
the Human Rights and Global Justice Thematic Group of the International Sociological Asso-
ciation (ISA) are designed to formalize a sociological approach to human rights. For the ASA
Section on Human Rights, see: http://www.asanet.org/cs/root/leftnav/sections/section_pages/
section_on_human_rights. For the ISA Thematic Group on Human Rights and Global Justice,
see http://www.isa-sociology.org/tg03.htm.
30 M. Frezzo / PGDT 9 (2010) 28-38

between human rights and democracy? Fourth, what are the prospects for a
more robust rights regime on a global scale?
Just as the sociology of human rights builds on the achievements and
expands the scope of the sociology of law, the emerging field of critical global-
ization studies moves beyond development studies to examine both the struc-
tural properties of globalization (understood as increasing economic, political,
social, and cultural integration) and the lived experience of ‘accelerated’ his-
torical time and ‘contracted’ geographic space. In essence, critical globaliza-
tion scholars have coalesced around the affirmation of six theoretical and
methodological principles: engaged scholarship, globalism, historicism, reflex-
ivity, de-centering, and interdisciplinarity (George 2005; Robinson 2005;
Mittelman 2005). Designed to avoid the twin pitfalls of value-neutrality (seen
as an outgrowth of positivism) and cultural relativism (seen as an overreaction
to Eurocentrism), critical globalization studies and the sociology of human
rights have contributed greatly to the debates on the three generations of
human rights, the balance-sheet of Third World developmentalism, and the
role of IGOs in the contemporary world.

Major Debates in Global Studies


Drawing on a world-historical analysis of four processes—the shift to a post-
Fordist work regime; the information revolution; the implementation of neo-
liberal policies of fiscal austerity, privatization, deregulation, financial
liberalization, and free trade by the IMF, the WB, the WTO, and compliant
national governments; and the growing rift between the US government and
the UN—this article evaluates the significance of what I have called the move-
ment-NGO-UN nexus3 for three major disputes in the interdisciplinary field
of global studies: the debate on the definition, scope, and applicability of
human rights (understood as a set of transnational norms, the inspiration for
an array of economic, political, social, cultural, and environmental policies,
and the “master frame” for a dense network of community organizations,
social movements, NGOs, and UN agencies); the debate on the successes and
failures of the post-Second World War development project (in its ‘bourgeois,’
‘mixed,’ and ‘socialist’ forms); and the debate on the past, present, and future
of global governance. In analyzing the underlying connections among human

3
I define the nexus as the force field in which grassroots mobilizations, NGOs, and UN agen-
cies collaborate and compete to define an agenda for human rights, with particular emphasis on
second and third-generation rights, along with the more abstract but potentially far-reaching
right to participate in democracy (Frezzo 2008a, 2008b).
M. Frezzo / PGDT 9 (2010) 28-38 31

rights, development, and global governance—a convergence that is routinely


overlooked in the respective literatures—I advance the following argument:
Notwithstanding different emphases, the debates on human rights, devel-
opment, and global governance all hinge on the problem of participatory
democracy—understood as both a process and an outcome.4
Phrased differently, the most prominent debates in the field of global stud-
ies presuppose three normative questions. First, how might second-generation
rights to equality and third-generation rights to solidarity be brought to frui-
tion? Second, how might popular participation in making decisions about
development—defined as planned social change to improve the material
well-being of society—be broadened and deepened? Third, how might the
institutions of global governance be democratized (by either transforming or
replacing the IMF, the WB, the WTO, and the UN)? Owing to the existence
of three distinct literatures on human rights, development, and global gover-
nance, these questions have been examined separately. Yet the common
denominator among these issues merits further elucidation: Under what con-
ditions might we shift state-effects from the nation-state to global and local
entities?
In elaborating an anthropological theory of the state, Trouillot (2003) ana-
lyzes four state-effects:

(1) an isolation effect, that is the production of atomized individualized subjects molded
and modeled for governance as part of an undifferentiated yet specified ‘public’; (2) an
identification effect, that is a realignment of the atomized subjectivities along collective
lines within which individuals recognize themselves as the same; (3) a legibility effect,
that is, the production of both a language and a knowledge for governance, of theo-
retical and empirical tools that classify, serialize, and regulate collectivities, and of the
collectivities so engendered; (4) a spatialization effect, that is the production of bound-
aries—both internal and external—of territories and jurisdiction (2003:81).

Building on Trouillot’s analysis, I argue that it is through these state-effects


that human beings are constituted as bearers of rights, subjects and objects of
development, and participants in democracy. Yet these state-effects appear not

4
As Tilly (2007) has argued, “it makes no sense simply to describe an ideal political system
called democracy and then try to specify the conditions under which that system could emerge
and survive. Democracy is a dynamic process that always remains incomplete and perpetually
runs the risk of reversal—of de-democratization” (Tilly 2007:xi). In focusing on the historical
evolution of putatively democratic and republican regimes—as distinguished from the models of
democracy advanced by political theorists from the Enlightenment to the present day—Tilly
de-emphasizes the problem of popular participation at the local, national, and global levels.
Nevertheless, Tilly’s process-oriented perspective on democracy proves useful for the analysis of
the diffusion of participatory models across the movement-NGO-UN nexus.
32 M. Frezzo / PGDT 9 (2010) 28-38

only on the level of the national government, but also on the global level
(through the mediation of such IGOs as the IMF, the WB, the WTO, and the
UN) and the local level (through the mediation of NGOs and community
groups). On the one hand, the phenomenon can be seen as a consequence of
globalization, as state sovereignty is challenged from both levels. On the other
hand, the phenomenon can be understood as an outgrowth of social move-
ments and NGOs contesting neoliberal policies. In this light, it is noteworthy
that the UN finds itself caught in the middle: While it is formally structured
to operate as a partner of the IMF and the WB, it has increasingly found itself
in the orbit of NGOs and movements. This has effectively widened the rift
between the UN and such IGOs as the IMF and the WB. While original
breach between the UN and the IMF/WB can be traced to the turmoil sur-
rounding the Declaration for the Establishment of a New International Eco-
nomic Order (NIEO) in 1974, the rift has widened considerably in the last
thirty-five years (Frezzo and Araghi 2009). In sum, the UN serves not only as
a cauldron for debates on second and third-generation rights, alternative
development, and participatory democracy, but also as a source of legitimacy
for NGOs and movements (Smith 2008).

Participatory Democracy
In the process of demanding second-generation rights to equality and third-
generation rights to solidarity, movements, NGOs, and UN agencies routinely
touch on participatory democracy—an ill-defined yet powerful concept that
has haunted the legacy of the Enlightenment. Notwithstanding the top-down
structure of the UN and many prominent NGOs—a problem addressed in
the literature on the sponsorship and possible “NGO-ization” of movements
(Shefner 1999; INCITE! 2007)—calls for participatory democracy have
echoed across the nexus. In effect, models of participatory democracy are
designed to overcome the seemingly intractable disputes that have plagued
scholars and policymakers: individual rights versus collective rights; develop-
mentalism versus anti-developmentalism; and globalism versus localism (Don-
nelly 2003; Rist 2002; Goodhart 2009). Similarly, such models are routinely
marshaled to neutralize the binary oppositions that have impeded activists:
reform versus revolution; vanguardism versus spontaneism; and statism versus
anti-statism (Starr 2005; Day 2005; de Sousa Santos 2006).
Despite its apparent novelty, participatory democracy has a long history. In
effect, participatory democracy attempts to break out of the most significant
debate in the history of the left—the debate between advocates of reform
(usually social democrats supporting the parliamentary path to state power)
M. Frezzo / PGDT 9 (2010) 28-38 33

and advocates of revolution (usually communists supporting the seizure of the


state apparatus) (Sassoon 1998). Notwithstanding profound differences in
organization, doctrine, and geographic reach, these two approaches—often
termed evolutionary and revolutionary socialism respectively—shared an
emphasis on party politics and a vision of the state as the primary agent of
social transformation. With the disintegration of the two models of historical
socialism—along with the assumption that the state constitutes the privileged
instrument of social change—movements across the world began not only to
articulate their demands in terms of human rights, participatory democracy,
and global justice (as opposed to socialism), but also to question the practical-
ity and desirability of taking state power (whether by ballot or bullet). To the
end of explaining this trend, this article historicizes the resurgence of participa-
tory democracy in the globalization era.
Present in embryonic form at the founding of the International Working-
men’s Association in 1864 and reaching their mature articulations with the
split in the working-class movement in 1919-1920, the evolutionary and rev-
olutionary tendencies defined the trajectory of the worldwide left through the
Great Depression (1929-1941), the Second World War (1939-1945), the
postwar reconstruction, and the peak of US hegemony (1945-early 1970s).
For a variety reasons—including the ‘fit’ between the demands of working-
class parties and the Keynesian-developmentalist consensus—participatory
alternatives found limited opportunities during this period. However, things
began to change in the crisis of the 1970s—a crisis that afflicted Keynesian
welfare states in the First World, socialist regimes in the Second World, and
developmental states—whether ‘bourgeois,’ ‘non-aligned,’ or ‘socialist’—in
the Third World. As transnational corporations began to break out of the
strait-jacket of regulation (culminating in the post-Fordist regime of produc-
tion), left-leaning parties abandoned the Keynesian management of capitalism
in favor of a neoliberal adjustment to globalization.
While the cases of the British Labour Party and the French Socialist Party
were particularly emblematic of the exhaustion of social democracy, the same
process unfolded not only in the United States (with the drift of the Demo-
cratic Party away from the policies of the New Deal and Great Society to the
North American Free Trade Agreement and the “end of welfare as we know
it”), but also in Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, and many other parts of the world.
Despite variation across national contexts—with a different political opportu-
nity structure in each setting—popular responses to fiscal austerity, free trade,
and other market reforms have followed the same pattern.
In short, the triple decline of welfare, state socialism, and development—
often dubbed the “retreat of the state”—created the preconditions for new
forms of resistance. In resisting the pressures of post-Fordism and neoliberalism,
34 M. Frezzo / PGDT 9 (2010) 28-38

popular forces have relied heavily on advanced communications technologies


not only to exchange ideas about philosophies, strategies, and tactics, but also
to engage in cyber-activism as a supplement to such conventional forms of
protest as marches, sit-ins, and strikes (Langman 2005). Owing to the exigen-
cies of globalization, movements tend to organize themselves in a decentral-
ized, non-hierarchical manner. These forms of organization merit further
study.
What happened? Over time, the implementation of neoliberal policies of
fiscal austerity (cutting social programs), deregulation (lifting labor and envi-
ronmental laws), privatization (selling-off state-owned enterprises), financial
liberalization (lifting controls on the flow of capital), and free trade (lifting
subsidies on exports and tariffs on imports) created a space for community
groups, grassroots movements, NGOs, and other civil society actors to esca-
late and coordinate their activities. As popular forces came to the realization
that they could no longer rely on left-leaning political parties and trade unions
to represent their interests, they shifted to an emphasis on decentralization as an
organizational philosophy, the alternative development of communities as an
objective, dialogue as a strategy, and direct action as a tactic (Starr 2005).
Although the literature on social movements has explored a number of
mobilizations for participatory democracy—including the Landless Rural
Workers in Brazil (officially active since 1984), the Zapatistas in Mexico (offi-
cially active since 1993) and the Movement of Recovered Factories in Argen-
tina (officially active since 2001)—insufficient attention has been paid to the
global context of these mobilizations. Since the emergence of the WSF—
founded in 2001 as an arena for community groups, movements, NGOs, and
intellectuals pursuing human rights and participatory democracy—scholars
have illuminated transnational alliances among such organizations (Tarrow
2005).
Though only a brief event, the United States Social Forum (USSF), held in
Atlanta in the summer of 2007, offered a glimpse of the diverse array of forces
pushing for direct democracy in the US. It is reasonable to expect a similar
spectrum of forces, organized according to the WSF’s Charter of Principles, at
the 2010 USSF in Detroit. More broadly, such decentralized entities as Food
Not Bombs (officially active since 1982), the Coalition of Immokalee Workers
(officially active since 1993) and its solidarity group, the Student-Farmworker
Alliance (officially active since 2000), and United Students against Sweatshops
(officially active since 1997) have advanced the perspective of participatory
democracy in manifold ways. Despite their circumscribed purviews—includ-
ing feeding the homeless, fair trade, the rights of farmworkers, the rights of
immigrants, the rights of factory workers, and a living wage for all inhabitants
M. Frezzo / PGDT 9 (2010) 28-38 35

of the US—such organizations serve as seedbeds for a more expansive vision


of participatory democracy. Since the anti-WTO protests in Seattle in 1999,
such organizations have operated in the spirit of solidarity with movements in
the global South (especially the Zapatistas in Mexico). This represents a major
shift for US-based mobilizations. Moreover, the diffusion of the social forum
model points to the realignment of movements around the radicalization of
the discourse of human rights. While it is not surprising that movements
would opt to push rights discourse to its limits—for example, by demanding
the right to land, water, a livelihood, a cultural identity, and a clean environ-
ment—it is highly significant that UN agencies would acknowledge the legiti-
macy of such rights claims (Blau and Moncada 2005; Blau and Moncada
2006; Smith 2008).

The UN Paradox

Rooted in the tumultuous 1970s, which witnessed fiscal crises of welfare states
in the First World, socialist states in the Second World, and developmental
states in the Third World, what I have termed the UN paradox emerged with
the contentious debate on Third Worldism in the UN system. Covering a
range of positions—including Pan-Arabism, Pan-Africanism, African social-
ism, and similar perspectives in Asia—the Third Worldist current emerged
with the Bandung Conference of Asian and African Nations in 1955, picked
up momentum with the first meeting of the Non-Aligned Movement in 1961,
and came to fruition with the issuance of the NIEO in 1974 (Rist 2002).
A symptomatic reading of the relevant UN documents would illuminate
not only the palpable legacy of Third Worldism, but also, and more impor-
tantly, the responsiveness of the UN to more recent popular mobilizations for
economic and social rights (often bundled together in a sweeping conception
of the “right to longevity”), alternative development (understood as a para-
digm of environmentally sustainable development that is sensitive to issues of
gender and culture), and more expansive participation in democracy (espe-
cially through access to education, information, and advanced communica-
tions technologies). Although it remains to be seen how the paradoxical status
of the UN—as both a prominent player in what Smith (2008) has called the
“democratic globalization network” and the fulcrum of an interstate system
built in the late 1940s and refurbished in the early 1970s to facilitate the
objectives of US hegemony—will be resolved, it seems likely that the UN will
continue to play a prominent role not only in fashioning and disseminating
transnational norms, but also in legitimizing the undertakings of NGOs and
36 M. Frezzo / PGDT 9 (2010) 28-38

movements that pledge allegiance to human rights and, in the process,


renounce the violent path to state power.
A few UN documents merit consideration here. According to the Preamble
of the UN “Declaration on the Right to Development” (1986):

. . . development is a comprehensive economic, social, cultural process, which aims at


the constant improvement of the well-being of the entire population and of all indi-
viduals on the basis of their active, free and meaningful participation in development
and the fair distribution of benefits resulting therefrom (UN 1986).

In a similar fashion, the “Rio Declaration on Environment and Development”


(1992), which was promulgated at the famous Earth Summit, proposed devel-
opment as both a second-generation and a third-generation right, while the
“Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action” (1993), in emphasizing the
need for broader and deeper collaboration among UN agencies, NGOs, and
grassroots entities, affirmed the right to development as a precondition for the
realization of all other human rights. Finally, the “Declaration on the Rights
of Indigenous Peoples” (2007) affirms the right of indigenous peoples to “pur-
sue their own visions of economic and social development.”
These documents raise a number of thorny issues: the tension between the
right to national self-determination, which is sometimes reformulated as
the right to cultural autonomy, and the right to democracy, which presupposes
the implementation of voting rights and other inclusive procedures in all
nation-states and cultural jurisdictions; the problem of how to democratize
the UN system (e.g., by diminishing or eliminating the role of the Security
Council and augmenting the role of the General Assembly in decision-making
processes); and the problem of how to democratize an interstate system that
has, since its inception with the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, been defined by
enduring inequalities and the primacy of national interest. Nevertheless, the
documents, in reflecting the accumulation of three decades of popular pres-
sure, from the NIEO in 1974 to the WSF in 2001 and beyond, testify to a sea
change in the global system.
Though limited by its charter, bureaucratic structure, and mandate to sup-
port state-building, development, security, and peacekeeping—not to men-
tion its location in New York and its beholdenness to US funding—the UN
has achieved a modicum of relative autonomy vis-à-vis the US government,
the IMF, and the WB. Accordingly, it is imperative for scholars and activists
alike to abandon the tendency to view the UN as a mere instrument of US
power. More to the point, the increasing autonomy of the UN—evidenced by
the role of various agencies not only in constructing a more robust human
rights regime, but also in aiding NGOs and social movements committed to
M. Frezzo / PGDT 9 (2010) 28-38 37

human rights—testifies to the decline of US hegemony. This issue merits


deeper consideration in future studies of hegemony and world order.

Conclusion
In conclusion, the growing gap between the UN and the IMF/WB and the
concomitant emergence of the movement-NGO-UN nexus have proven
auspicious for popular forces seeking a viable alternative to neoliberalism.
That such forces would articulate their demands in the language of human
rights and democracy—without falling into the trap of Eurocentrism—
should not surprise scholars in the field of global studies. Indeed, these move-
ments propose three questions for the research agenda of global studies.
What is the significance of the right to participate in democracy? What does
it mean to have the right to development, alternative development, or even
to eschew development altogether? How can the architecture of global gov-
ernance be made more democratic, transparent, and accountable? It is in
attempting to answer these questions that the field of global studies will live
up to its mission.

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