OSCOW —No issue has been more dramatically used, or abused, during the long, bleak years of the cold war than human rights. Selectively defined, aggressively championed, human rights were said to be the very essence of that titanic confrontation between competing global creeds. Now that at least the ideological veil of the cold war has slipped, there is finally an opportunity to rescue the fundamental issues from superpower rivalry and to give them systematic meaning in the struggle for a better future. For historical, psychological and struc- tural reasons, a real breakthrough in human rights awareness seems at the moment more likely to emerge in the Soviet Union and the transitional states of Eastern Europe than in the advanced liberal capitalist democracies of the West. However, unless progress to- ward a higher, integral understanding of human rights soon acquires a global charac- ter, and a mass following, the very survival of humanity may be in doubt. For several decades the United States has dominated public discourse on human rights with a limited, distinctly 18th century ap- preciation of the subject. The American and French revolutions of two centuries ago were based on a militant reading of Locke, Hume, Montesquieu and Adam Smith, all of , Fred : Weir FROM MOSCOW whom postulated certain “natural rights of man,” or areas in which the state must give way to the prerogatives of the individual. The French Declaration of the Rights of Manin 1789 summarized these as “freedom, property, security, and the right of resistance to oppression.” : ; This is what human rights activists today define as the “first generation” of liberties: political and civil rights, such as freedom of speech, of the press, of assembly, equality before the law, and so forth. Historically, they are associated with bourgeois revolu- tions and capitalist development. Politically, they are negative, that is, they describe what governments cannot do rather than what they should do.° Proceeding from this position, succes- sive U.S. administrations have directed withering propaganda fire against chosen adversaries, such as the USSR, who were seen to violate these freedoms. More fundamentally, perhaps, the United States is one of the few large countries in the world which have refused to ratify the United Nations Covenants on Human Rights precisely because they mandate in- trusive “second generation” economic and social rights. The U.S. position has always been that guaranteeing the right to a job, housing, medical care, or legislating correc- tives to racism and sexism, only increases the power of the state and therefore limits the scope of individual freedom. Second generation rights have now been accepted by a substantial part of the world community, and seen as a necessary development of first generation rights. Put siiiply, voting rights are of little use to starv- ing, homeless or illiterate people. 6 + Pacific Tribune, September 17, 1990 The Soviet Union is a country that never had a bourgeois revolution, and which set out after 1917 to overtake and transcend the capitalist experience. The Stalinist concep- tion of human rights came to revolve ex- clusively around the second generation agenda: free education, medical care, job security, affordable housing, food, transport, legal equality, and so on. The Soviet position was that in ensuring material rights, a higher level of freedom had been achieved. When attacked for its treatment of dissidents, Soviet propaganda would lash angrily back with illustrations of poverty, homelessness and unemployment in the West. On the propaganda level, the cold war was, in effect, a dialogue of the deaf between these two world views. Each side sought to export its own model and each endeavoured, within its own sphere, to destroy any alter- native that might attempt to redefine human rights so as to incorporate both levels of freedom. This the Soviet Union did forceful- ly when, in 1968, it crushed Czecho- slovakia’s experiment with “socialism with a human face.” The Americans have done the same re- peatedly —- Grenada and Nicaragua spring to mind — and continue to do so in a variety of ways. This is certainly the point of Wash- ington’s current pressure campaign to con- vince Eastern Europeans that there is no “third way” between Stalinism and free- market capitalism. However, as we enter the 1990s, it is increasingly obvious that both existing para- digms of world experience are politically inadequate, and morally bankrupt as well. The revolutions in Eastern Europe have made it abundantly clear that even well-fed Czechs and East Germans, having job sec- urity and free health care, will not tolerate being deprived of political freedoms. There no longer can be any argument that second generation rights somehow obviate, or remove the need for first generation liber- ties. “The Soviet Union has to be humble about this,” argues Felix Stanyevsky, a Soviet foreign ministry official and delegate to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights. “If we want to talk about building a socialist democracy, this has to be done by first guaranteeing the highest level of democracy to be found in the world, and transcending it. Nothing less than that deser- ves the name.” He continues: “If we don’t incorporate civil and political rights, we cannot arrive at a position where economic and social rights can be observed. On the other hand, if we don’t ensure economic and social rights, civil and political rights will not be substan- tial. I am sure that political rights are much more important to someone with a good job and secure material life than someone with- out these. If you do not have social rights, it is difficult to be aware of political pos- sibilities.” This underlines a critical continuing dif- ference between the Soviet position and the aggressively triumphant attitude of the United States. The Soviets — and many Eastern European countries as well — have not abandoned second generation guaran- tees. On the contrary, what they now hope to find is a synthesis, a “democratic socialism,” rather than to adopt the American model. The failure of the American system, while not as spectacular, seems just as com- plete. After two centuries of liberal capitalism, which created the world’s most powerful economy, the United States still does not provide adequately for all its people. Almost 40 million Americans have no health insurance. There are up to three million homeless in the country, and a new study indicates that American children are less healthy and enjoy fewer edutational opportunities than their parents did. Amer- ican inner-cities have come to resemble war- zones, while murder has become the leading cause of death among young males. It is manifestly obvious that first generation free- doms do not lead automatically to the attain- ment of second generation standards of well-being. Indeed the American record in providing social security is far worse than that of other capitalist countries, most of which have evolved beyond 18th century concepts of freedom and adopted some second genera- tion policies. Stanyevsky’s remark about the inter-re- latedness of social and political rights is also graphically illustrated by American exper- ience. Political apathy runs very high in the U.S., where the most recent presidential election saw barely 50 per cent of those eligible actually vote. Statistics show that of those who did not vote, an overwhelming proportion were the poor, the ill-educated, the underclass. Brilliant 18th century slogans can no longer serve to mask vast social inequalities — what John K. Galbraith once identified as “private affluence amid public squalor.” Yet the tendency of the United States, at least, has been to fall back ever more stubbornly - on these founding ideals, even as the crisis deepens. The inclination of Eastern Europeans to view human rights as a seamless web of first and second generation freedoms and guar- antees is not abstract. It flows from history, and from the very structure of their societies. Rights once granted are doubly difficult to withdraw. This is strikingly apparent in the Soviet context. Debates in parliament concerming transition to a market economy have be- come superheated over the demand to up- hold social and economic rights. Public reaction has been so intense that even radical proponents of free-market “shock therapy” find themselves driven to at least rhetorically defend traditional social guarantees. A recent incident in downtown Moscow illuminates the depth of egalitarian feelings. Several dozen families who had been wait- ing years to be allotted new apartments stormed and occupied a new building — just next door to the “October” party hotel — which had been constructed to house func- tionaries of the CPSU central committee. Tense negotiations between the squatters, the Moscow city council and the CPSU finally led to a section of the building being permanently turned over to large, under- housed families. It is unthinkable, in the West, that the rich could be compelled to surrender any part of their housing to the poor in a similar manner. However, the Soviet elite have no developed structures of property rights orclass domina- tion to fall back on as they attempt to pre- serve their privileges. However reluctantly, they wind up bending with the public mood, ingrained social convictions, and their own declared principles. All of these share a com- mittment to social justice. The key point of reference for construc- tion of a future regime of human rights in the Soviet Union is the development of society’s capacity for self-organization, argues Alexander Ignatev, a political observer with the Novosti Information Agency. “People believe strongly in social and economic rights, and that is very good,” he says. “The negative side is that they have grown used to expecting the state, the party, or trade unions, or someone, to secure it all for them. When these institutions fail, they do not know what to do. Social self-defence, through displays of public opinion, or- ganizations and actions — like those squat- ters in the party flats — is the only way to develop this side of our life. “Actually, that’s a very Marxist point, isn’t it? People have to struggle for change, to achieve it themselves through self-or- ganization, or else it won’t be meaningful. The lack of this in our political culture is the direct result of Stalinism.” So, can we now envision an evolution toward societies which synthesize the first and second generations of human rights — an idea some commentators have dubbed “convergence” — aiming to provide their citizens with the best of both worlds? The late Andrei Sakharov, for instance, was a great believer in this view. Unfortunately, this hopeful expectation is increasingly hostage to some very tough global realities. In recent years, environmentalists, peace activists, scientists, development critics and others, have begun to place onto the agenda a “third generation” of rights, which might be broadly summed up as the right to sur- vive. In short, people may be materially secure and also enjoy full political and civic liberty, yet it will all be to no avail if the air and water they live by is poisoned or they are menaced by modem warfare. Global warming, ozone depletion, the destruction of primeval forests, trans- boundary acid rain, and quite a lot else are all problems of the third generation. No legal framework properly exists within the inter- national community for addressing these looming disasters. “The trouble is that we are very late here,” admits Stanyevsky. “These problems are becoming extremely urgent. We are still trying to sort out first and second generation rights, while the third generation questions are already pounding on the door.” One critical third generation problem, which contains the elements of all others within it, is that of development. A huge proportion of the world’s population has never experienced either a capitalist or a socialist revolution, and continues to live largely without rights of any kind. Their plight has implications at every level of the human rights ladder. United Nations figures show that cur- rently about three-quarters of a_ billion people on Earth live at starvation level. One hundred million people are homeless — in- cluding 30 million children — while a bil- lion more have inadequate shelter. Political and civil rights are, not coincidentally, as rare as material well-being. It should be clear by now that the exten- sion of existing socio-economic systems will not be able to solve this global predica- ment. To take just one striking indicator of this: the United States — the heartland of capitalism — represents just six per cent of the world’s population, but consumes over 40 per cent of its resources. The planet can- not continue to support America’s consump- tion patterns indefinitely, much less bring everyone else up to the same levels. As we approach the close of the 20th century, all of our received wisdom, as well as our economic and political structures, are in profound, possibly terminal crisis. The challenge of today is to build a movement which can synthesize the three generations of human rights into one vision capable of animating global political mobilization. Far from being an academic problem, or a moral crusade, the struggle for compre- hensive and universal human rights is our only prescription for survival into the next century.