The international human rights system, with its diverse global movements, is epoch-making, allowing stigma to be applied to errant states on matters of crucial global concern. But promoting its exclusive relevance in the face of injustice, as if the alternative were apathy or despair, is simply not going to cut it.
In fact, the election of Donald Trump furnishes an opportunity to transcend the naïve celebration and apocalyptic criticism of international human rights in the name of balance about their true importance. The disagreement of my friends Stephen Hopgood and Kathryn Sikkink may miss the point, but not simply in their mutually cancelling extremism. Neither one appreciates that human rights could well complement a political response to populism, but not compensate for the failure to construct that response in the first place.
Sikkink has my support to the extent that she emphasizes the crucial achievement of global judgment on states, especially ones that depart radically from a now worldwide consensus around civil and political liberties, including racially discriminatory treatment. But rather than facing our unique present, Sikkink is turning to history for the wrong reason: attempting to restore a now obsolete status quo ante that treated the past as a fund of uplifting examples—good people struggling for just results against mindless evil—to argue for an exclusively necessary framework now. Real history not only marks undoubted achievements but stares strict limits in the face. And no matter how good our ancestors were in making possible some political options, it cannot change that we might need different ones now.
