| Photo by S. Beth Atkin |
John Shattuck Interview (1997): Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
| Photo by S. Beth Atkin |
Page 3 of 7
Tell us a little about the debates in Washington on issues like China, where one probably has to fight these issues out to see which emphasis -- national interests, economic interests, balance-of-power interests, vs. human rights interests -- will prevail in making the policy.
To put it very generally, I think there are three camps on how we should organize our foreign policy today. Human rights fits differently into each one of these camps. First is the old "realist" camp, the Kissinger camp, the sort of Metternichian view of the world where you're going to balance powers against powers and have governments engaged in very traditional forms of diplomacy to try to reach some kind of stable international system. That was out of vogue for a while at the end of the Cold War, but I think it's coming back to a certain extent. Human rights are very much of a sidelight, if anything, in that view. And incidentally, many of those people, many of the realists (I should say realpolitik, I shouldn't call them realists) are the ones who are in favor of a policy toward China that has extremely limited room for human rights advocacy and basically does everything it can to try to make sure that the relations between China and the United States, as two great powers, are stable, and that anything that destabilizes those relations should probably not be pursued.
The second group emphasizes economics above all. This is not surprising. We should remember how President Clinton, in the inimitable words of James Carville, came to power under the slogan, "It's the economy, stupid." And that's not wrong, because the United States has been in the position of having to compete in the global economy for some years now and there were real doubts about whether we were going to be able to do that. Had we not been able to do that, the welfare of huge numbers of American citizens would be seriously affected. So there's been a tremendous growth of the economic visionaries, if you will: those who have been promoting free market economics and open trade and broader international economic systems, sometimes at the expense of other interests, downplaying to a certain extent security interests, downplaying to a certain extent human rights, environment, etc., but still having them be part of the system, perhaps more than the realpolitik people would have.
The third vision is the global vision, and here is where human rights, the environment, population, and the great international change that's occurring is emphasized more than in the other two. I think there's a relationship between the second and the third groups, that is to say the economic group and the global group, because it's clear that if we are to have a stable international economic development, we've got to have stable relations among countries at the grassroots level. That is to say, human rights have to be preserved. Otherwise you're going to have worker rebellions and you're going to have environmental catastrophes, and you're going to have Bosnias and Rwandas that cause huge regional destabilization. I think the global perspective, which represents the human rights interests most strongly, has gained in prominence over the course of the last four or five years, and it works closely with the economic specialists. When it comes to China, I think we all recognize that there is, in fact, a positive aspect of our economic policy toward China vis-à-vis human rights. Because the more China develops economically, the larger its middle class, the more opportunities are presented to people, the more openness that occurs to the outside world, the more likelihood that there will be human rights progress. And yet, that's not the only issue. There has to be some diplomacy and other ways of pursuing human rights as well. So I think the debates that you talked about really focus around those three camps. Certainly the realpolitik folks are the ones who would least pursue the human rights agenda.
Next page: The Evolving Nature of Human Rights Work
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