Human Rights Quandary

The Costs of Vagueness

OF ALL THE NEW problems posed by the collapse of the Soviet empire none is more urgent than the need for Washington to devise what would be called, if Leninist jargon were still in fashion, a nationalities policy. As long as Moscow managed to smother ethnic conflicts within its dominions, the lack of such a policy hardly mattered. The United States could and did get by with indiscriminate support of virtually all grievances against Soviet rule, as long as they were couched in the rhetoric of human rights. Many of these were cases of individual rights—the right of Andrei Sakharov, for instance, to espouse views at variance with official ideology. But others were claims to collective rights, like that of Balts, Georgians and Armenians to secede from the Soviet Union and form independent countries. Now that the artificial order of Soviet power has vanished, the unbridled assertion of collective rights, most often expressed as an aspiration to national self-determination, has become a major threat to global stability. The United States can no longer afford to be vague in its thinking about individual and nationality rights.

The Bush administration, unfortunately, failed to realize the necessity for a new and precise policy. It relegated the new questions of nationalities to the area of human rights policy. And once the Cold War was over, human rights issues largely slipped off the administration’s agenda. This was a critical mistake. Not only did it contribute to the waffling evident in Washington’s approach to the Yugoslav conflict, but it also ignored the fact, proven in the Cold War, that the steadfast advocacy of a clearly defined set of human rights can be a powerful foreign policy tool—one that buttresses American leadership and undermines American adversaries. It also ignored the fact that whatever the practitioners of realpolitik might wish, a strong and bright moral component is essential to American foreign policy; without it, public support for foreign engagement tends rapidly to erode.

The challenge for the Clinton administration is to reformulate American human rights policy in the postcommunist era by defining the individual and collective rights the United States will support. Only then will American foreign policy have the requisite consistency of purpose to deal with the conflicting claims of emerging nationalities.

Dealing with Conflicting Claims