HUMAN RIGHTS QUARTERLY

Emotional Diplomacy and Human Rights
at the United Nations
Roland Burke*
ABSTRACTThis article investigates the role of emotion within the postwar humanrights program at the United Nations. While there is an impressive body ofscholarship on the UN and human rights diplomacy, the place of sentimentin the dynamic of these debates has not been studied in detail. Drawing
on archives, personal papers, contemporary transcripts and visual sources,
this article argues that the collective sentiment of the assembly was highly
influential in determining outcomes. Beyond this, the nature of the prevailing emotional register, which varied markedly between the 1940s and1980s, shaped, and was reshaped by, the prevailing understanding of what
constituted “human rights.”

I.

INTRODUCTION

After almost two decades of Western, and United States, diplomatic failuresin the human rights and humanitarian spheres of the General Assembly, incoming US Ambassador Daniel Patrick Moynihan located part of the cause.
Consumed by more material questions, the State Department simply did notcare about fighting in the human rights space.1 US diplomacy in the United
Nations, a global symbolic theatre, had neglected an evanescent, intangible*		 Roland Burke is a senior lecturer in history at La Trobe University, and author of Decolonization and the Evolution of International Human Rights (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010).
His research focuses on human rights and internationalism and has been published widely
across numerous journals. Burke’s current project, a monograph on the changing meaningsof the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in the 1960s and 70s, will be completed in
the near future.
		1. Reproduced in William F. Buckley, Jr., United Nations Journal: A Delegate’s Odyssey 259(1974); See also Daniel Patrick Moynihan, The Politics of Human Rights, 64 Comment.
29 (1977).
Human Rights Quarterly 39 (2017) 273–295 © 2017 by Johns Hopkins University Press

274

HUMAN RIGHTS QUARTERLY

Vol. 39

aspect of the debate—emotion. These qualities had been observed fromthe earliest days of the program by US Delegate Eleanor Roosevelt and hercolleagues. In a 1951 address, Roosevelt had lamented that “we are very
stupid sometimes. I think we are so lacking in sensitivity to the feelings ofothers, very often,” and urged for “a greater effort” to appreciate the importance of sentiment.2 Much more than other realms of international politics,
the human rights and humanitarian enterprises were dominated less bymeasurable outcomes and standard geopolitical calculation. Instead, theseenterprises were dominated by convictions and feelings which often baffled
professional diplomats.
Human rights diplomacy was a province where sentiment mattered,
not merely due to the evocative power of the subject matter—the fate ofindividuals—but in the practice of diplomacy itself. This article argues thatthe deployment of emotion, in differing valences, held decisive influence on
the diplomatic and political dynamics of the postwar human rights project.
Sentiment and evocative symbols were at the core of the post-1945 order,
which openly appealed to visions of renewal and justice. For many of those
who sought to advance this project, particularly in the hopeful momentsof the immediate postwar years, to engage in “emotionalism” was both an
expression of fidelity to the purposes of human rights and humanitarianism,
and an indispensable realist calculation. Given that so much of human rights
diplomacy rested upon aspiration, inspiration, and exhortation, emotions
often mattered more than elegant legalism or specialist wisdom.
From the foundational years of the organization, human rights and humanitarian politics were shaped by the limits, and possibilities, imposed bycollegially produced sentiment. UNICEF’s extension in 1950 was, as British
representative Barbara Castle noted, a triumph of heart over technocratic
detail.3 On the grounds of efficiency, there was ample basis to constrain
the program and institute a heavily triaged scheme for the rationalizationof compassion; but sympathy within the General Assembly for impoverished, sickly, and orphaned children was such that virtually no one wishedto vote against an open, universal, commitment to aid. Notably, Roosevelt
and others who tried to defy the then prevailing regime of transformative
optimism, rather than mere transient palliation, found themselves cast to themargins.4 An ad hoc victory for this ambitious species of sympathy would
ultimately produce one of the most respected humanitarian programs in theUN.5 Whether the far less emotionally resonant alternative, which involved
		 2.
		3.
		4.
		5.

Eleanor Roosevelt, “A World for Peace” Speech at International House (5 Apr. 1951),
in 2 The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers: The Human Rights Years, 1949–1952, at 594, 592–96(Allida Black, ed., 2012).
Barbara Castle, UNICEF: The Permanent Emergency, in Uphill: Nine Leading Figures on the
United Nations’ Progress and Difficulties in 1950, at 15–23 (Stephen W. Pollak ed., 1950).
U.S. Explains Aim on Child-Feeding, N.Y. Times, 12 Oct. 1950, at 39.
Maggie Black, Children First: The Story of UNICEF, Past and Present (1996).

2017

Emotional Diplomacy and Human Rights

275

technocratically dispensed morsels of compassion, would have found such
persistent success and public appeal is less certain.
In the mid-1960s, outrage at South Africa’s defiance of global distaste forapartheid was the signature sentiment of the General Assembly. The anger
was expressed with unusual theatricality, with the UN Assembly chamber
emptied of delegations every time South Africa’s representative took the rostrum. Legalistic dissent from this angry consensus became too costly, evenfor countries with major strategic and economic interests in the apartheidstate. Britain’s 1961 reinterpretation of UN Charter, Article 2 (7), which mandated nonintervention in domestic jurisdiction, was driven by this collegial
anger. Tellingly, the Crown’s legal advice had not changed—but the moodwas such that South Africa was a “sui generis” case, where Article 2 (7) did
not operate. No juridical reasoning was presented to support the change,
and it would remain confined to South Africa for a further five years.6 The
rationale explicitly refuted any revision to the legal guidance, and gestured tosomething else. A year after the atrocity at Sharpeville, it had become clearthat apartheid was different, irrespective of what legal counsel indicated.7
The event space for international human rights diplomacy was boundnot only by politics, but by the functioning of emotion. Those who pretended
otherwise, and disavowed the legitimacy of shared sympathy and passionate
speech, frequently missed a crucial axis of the debate. In their studious overperformance of self-satisfied “rationality,” a number of the Western states,
which were notionally committed to the ideals of universality, inherence,and indivisibility, acted in ways that sharply attenuated the prospects for theirsuccessful realization. In puncturing unrealistic utopian hope, as opposed tocultivating and channeling it, the United States in particular foreclosed on
one of the few assets that the United Nations possessed. Whatever progress
the international human rights enterprise found, it found in moments where
there was a rough collective emotional consensus.
The inflexion of these emotions was, however, far from unitary; thehuman rights project after 1945 was more variegated than can be captured by the usual shorthand of “empathy” which has defined much of theemotional history of rights and the related phenomena of humanitarianism.
Human rights were paired with soaring hope and desperate need in the
1940s and 1950s; with rage in the 1960s and 1970s; and with despair andpity in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Each of the particular admixtures
		6.

		7.

Memorandum from British High Commissioner Regarding Human Rights Policies at
the United Nations (13 May 1966) (National Archives of Australia, Doc. No. A1838,929/5/6); Memorandum from Marc Schreiber, Director of Division of Human Rights, toC.V. Narasimhan, Chef de Cabinet (20 May 1966) (U.N. Chef de Cabinet. 1961–1973:
Narasimhan. Human Rights—General Correspondence. S-0198-002-001. U.N. Archives).
Document 20: Statement by Mr. Peter Smithers, Representative of the United Kingdom,in the Special Political Committee of the General Assembly, in The United Nations andApartheid, 1948–1994, 248 (1994).

276

HUMAN RIGHTS QUARTERLY

Vol. 39of emotion corresponded to markedly different visions of “human rights”:
from expansive and grand in the 1940s and 1950s, to narrow and punitivein the 1960s, to the minimalist palliation of the 1970s. For each of these
epochs, there was a distinctive register to speech and action, and a level ofconsonance in the sorts of emotions invoked. Overlapping and cross-cuttingwith the conventional political periodization, there was a periodization ofemotional registers—and each reveals something of how human rights were
understood and pursued at different moments. Activists and diplomats that
adjusted their ambitions to the prevailing register triumphed. Those thatfailed to adjust often failed badly—despite often holding a preponderance
in other forms of power.
Despite the axiomatic importance of emotion to the history of humanrights, there has been a degree of aversion to its explanatory power in thehistoriography. Much of the scholarship has been pioneered by diplomatic,
legal, and intellectual historians, fields that deal with emotion only incidentally.8 Within the burgeoning field of “emotions history” in the generalcase, there is a highly dynamic and increasingly sophisticated array of approaches and objects for study—but human rights has not, to date, been
given sustained attention.9 In part, this reserve is the scholarly sequel to an
ambivalence about open expression of feeling within humanitarian and human rights mobilizations.10 The modern human rights movement itself oftensought to efface the inherent activation of empathy that has been its sourceof animation.11 Amnesty International’s (AI) assorted 1977 guidance books
for members were decidedly careful in their instructions on how emotion
		8.
		 9.

10.

11.

For a rare and exceedingly impressive exception, see Barbara Keys, Henry Kissinger:
The Emotional Statesman, 35 Diplomatic Hist. 587, 590–92 (2011).
For a précis of the key works and current state of the art, see especially, Doing Emotions
History (Susan J. Matt & Peter N. Stearns eds., 2014); Ute Frevert, Emotions in History:
Lost and Found (2011); Ruth Leys, The Turn to Affect: A Critique, 37 Critical Inquiry 434(2011); Susan J. Matt, Current Emotion Research in History: Or, Doing History fromthe Inside Out, 3 Emotion Rev. 117 (2011); Erin Sullivan, The History of Emotions: Past,
Present, Future, 2 Cultural Hist. 93 (2013); Emotions and Social Change: Historical andSociological Perspectives (David Lemmings & Ann Brooks eds., 2014).
C.f. discussion, in the context of humanitarianism and human rights, from Jon Western,
Prudence or Outrage? Public Opinion and Humanitarian Intervention in Historical andComparative Perspective, in The Emergence of Humanitarian Intervention: Ideas and Practicefrom the Nineteenth Century to the Present 165 (Fabian Klose ed., 2016); Andrew Thomson,
Humanitarian Interventions, Past and Present, in The Emergence of Humanitarian Intervention, supra note 10, at 331, 340–43. Regarding lack of distaste for emotion in earlier
period, see Peter Balakian, Photography, Visual Culture, and the Armenian Genocide,in Humanitarian Photography: A History 89, 109 (Heide Fehrenbach & Davide Rodogno
eds., 2015). See also the substantial discussion of sentiment by key nineteenth-century
actors in Davide Rodogno, Against Massacre, Humanitarian Interventions in the Ottoman Empire,
1815–1914: The Emergence of a European Concept and International Practice (2012).
This aversion was not total, and greater open enthusiasm was evident in the 1960s, seefor instance, Victor G. Reuther’s 1967 Amnesty Human Rights Day Lecture, opened
with praise for the power of “the weaponless appeal to compassion.” Victor G. Reuther,Amnesty–Towards a World Conscience 1 (1967).

2017

Emotional Diplomacy and Human Rights

277

should be deployed for greatest effect. AI devoted large swathes of its example
letters to proper modes of address, at points reading more like an etiquette
guide for supplicants: the foremost principle for its South Asian section
was “always be polite.”12 Much of the organization’s tactical advice urged
a lexicon, and manner of entreaty, that played upon the apparent superior
status accorded to “reason.” According to AI, “even the most repressive
governments,” were often “anxious” to foster a belief that they were “fairand reasonable.”13 Overt recourse to passion appeared the recourse of lastresort in the ladder of activist escalation. For AI, such “symbolic actions,”
were kept in reserve—these were measures, which might “succeed in rousing
the spirit of people when other, more conventional, efforts have failed.”14
Heavily affective symbolism, such as public funeral ceremonies, tree plantings, and public prayers could “have a deep emotional impact,” but thiswas not the preferred mode.15 Even for the rapidly growing and confident
AI, the pursuit of a respectable, institutionalized place in international affairs
demanded just enough emotion to impel action and spur mobilization, andthe careful avoidance of any surplus.
The Director of the United Nations Human Rights Division, John Humphrey, was struck by the same tendency to denigrate emotion and cleave itfrom reason. As co-architect of the Universal Declaration, Humphrey wasa figure who had already suffered immense hardship as a child, including
the loss of his parents, and the loss of his arm in a fire. Humphrey had anexperiential command of profound misery. Reflecting on the dictates of his
new UN colleague, Joseph Nisot, Humphrey rejected the simplicity thatclaimed, as Nisot had, that “emotionalism is a sign of barbarianism.”16 Nisot
had expounded at length that a person was “civilized only to the extent
that” their behavior was “dictated” by the imperatives of “intellect.”17 Afterseeing untamed intellect grind the UN program to a halt shortly after 1948,
Humphrey wryly observed that Nisot’s trust in pure reason was unlikely to
induce any faith in the future. “Perhaps,” the Director wrote, “this explains
his defeatism.” For his part, Humphrey reflected that he had “learned to
distrust intellectualism,” and now held “more faith in the emotions.” “Theintellect,” he concluded in September 1949, was “an instrument,” and “whatuse it will be put depends entirely on sentiment and emotion.”18
12.

13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.

Amnesty Int’l, “What Should I Say in My Letters?”, in Guide for Letter Writers (South Asian
Section) 9 (1973) (AI Index: PUB 73/00/77); see also, on the importance of reason anddecorousness, Amnesty Int’l, Letters to the Soviet Authorities: A Handbook of Advice for AI
Groups 1 (1976).
The Value of Writing Letters, in Guide for Letter Writers, supra note 12, at 3.
Martin Ennals, Symbolic Actions, in Amnesty International Handbook 35 (1977).
Id.
Diary Entry for Friday, 2 September 1949 in 1 On the Edge of Greatness: The Diaries ofJohn Humphrey, First Director of the United Nations Division of Human Rights 1948–1949,
211 (A.J. Hobbins ed., 1994).
Id.
Id.

278

HUMAN RIGHTS QUARTERLY

Vol. 39

The falsity of glib distinctions between “reason” and “emotion” hadbeen identified by humanitarians for well over a century, most acutely by
Edmund Morel and Thomas Clarkson.19 Yet assumptions of an emotional
dimension to diplomacy challenged fundamental precepts of bureaucratized
operation and specialist technical knowledge, which increasingly definedmodern Western foreign services. Diplomatic practice held centuries ofaccreted convention on self-control, a purported basis in rationality andreason cauterized from feeling, and studious measurement in language.20
The epithet of emotionalism was readily thrown at human rights advocates,
especially as the movement gained force and institutional foothold in thelate 1970s. One of the more memorable insults directed at AI was from the
Kenyan government, which by the 1970s, was well established as a corrupt
and autocratic state. A 1977 statement from the Kenyan Attorney Generaldismissed AI as an organization for “frustrated old women,” or in short,a coalition of the hysterical.21 Tirades from dictators on “emotionalism”
might have been expected, and only a few of AI’s critics seemed to parse
the boundaries of what was understood as reason, and what constituted
emotion, with any clarity. The border corresponded to convenience. Yet the
problem of distinguishing emotional diplomacy from its classical sibling was
not placing the boundary, but presuming it existed in the first place. Satisfaction in moderate speech and action, against abuses and horrors which were
far distant from moderation, was its own perverse expression of emotion.
The emotional reward for subordinating personal conscience, of detachingbravura argument from subject matter, was the pleasure of professional andscholarly pride.22
II. HOPE: THE FLEETING EUPHORIA OF A “WORLD MADE NEW” IN
HUMAN RIGHTS.
Almost every periodization of the modern human rights project commenced
in 1945, or at the latest, 1948. Almost all, even those skeptical of the pious
professions of a “new deal for the world” or Roosevelt’s prayer for “a world
19.

20.
21.
22.

See Clarkson’s extraordinary account of the dialogue between empiricism, reason, andsentiment in the preparation of his famous 1785 essay on the injustice of slavery, Thomas
Clarkson, The History of the Rise, Progress, and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African
Slave-Trade by the British Parliament 137–38 (1839); Edmund D. Morel, Affairs of West Africa(1902); see also the discussion of Las Casas and Tecumseh in William J. Talbott, Which
Rights Should Be Universal? 65–73 (2005).
For an overview of the centuries of practice and convention, notably with respect topersonal conduct and language, see The Diplomats’ World: A Cultural History of Diplomacy,
1815–1914 (Markus Mösslang & Torsten Riotte eds., 2008).
Amnesty Int’l, AI in Quotes 4 (1985).
For an earlier encounter with this dynamic, by a more self-aware observer, see Clarkson,supra note 19, at 137–38.

2017

Emotional Diplomacy and Human Rights

279

made new,” tend to carve out the early post-war moment as anomalously
hopeful. In symbolism, the ethereal quality of the first five years of the UN
program was unmistakable. The delegations crafted their first texts within at
the interim UN site on Long Island, which had previously held the Sperry
Company. Sperry’s plant had manufactured bombing avionics during the war,
for the weapons that destroyed the Third Reich’s war industry—and in theprocess, tragically killed many citizens in Occupied Europe and Germany. As
the Declaration took shape in 1948, it did so not only in the US, but also inpost-liberation France, where the memories of Oradur and Vichy remained
vivid, and the damage, psychic and material, was visible. At the Palais desChaillot, Dutch representative Marga Klompe and Annie Newlands of New
Zealand taught visiting French children about the new vision, from within
the Commission’s debate room. In one of the more, and few, evocativearchival images of UN proceedings, Newlands, who had lost her son in
the war, is surrounded by the children; concentrated in expression, as thecheerful Klompe speaks to one young girl.23 Another scene has the children
sitting alongside the delighted chair of the Commission, Charles Malik, andRoosevelt.24 Their efforts were building the philosophical architecture thatthe children, born into war and occupation, would inhabit.25
Public relations materials were relentlessly optimistic, with an implied
narrative of a world traversing the expanse between totalitarianism andtotal war to a promised realm of justice, freedom, and security. The flagship example of this was UNESCO’s travelling Human Rights Exhibition,
which opened in late 1949.26 The Human Rights Exhibition took concepts
from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), which circulated
as plain and spare type in a single-fold stapled, pamphlet, and translated
them into a journey of hope.27 Wandering across the globe, from Port-auPrince to Manila, the Exhibition had slight shifts in emphases at each site,
and additional local extensions to encourage greater attachment from eachaudience. Built around the canonical Western story of Magna Carta, to Enlightenment, through abolitionism, it had myriad strands inclusive of a wide
set of traditions and emancipatory struggles.28 Viewers transited through aspirally organized, progressive, and spatial walk through time. Mindful that
23.
24.
25.

26.
27.
28.

U.N. Photograph No. 170762, 1 Nov. 1948, Paris.
U.N. Photograph No. 330730, 1 Nov. 1948, Paris; see also, U.N. Photograph No.
123898, It’s Human Rights Day For Them Too, 1 Dec. 1950, Lake Success.
Cassin on architecture of temple, a spatial-conceptual architecture he elaborated uponwhen explaining the UDHR in 1951, thinking in spatial terms, Mary Ann Glendon, A
World Made New: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights 172(2001).
UNESCO, Human Rights Exhibition: Album (1950).
Representative early copy, typical of those mass distributed, The Universal Declarationof Human Rights, UN Sales Number (1948) I. 3.
It was sufficiently inclusive to produce complaint from the Catholic periodical, Tablet,
Pierre d’Aleth, A UNESCO Exhibition, Tablet (26 Nov. 1949).

280

HUMAN RIGHTS QUARTERLY

Vol. 39

the text was “abstract,” the curators were determined to have illustrations
that produced engagement and “theatre,” where there was at least someprospect of an affective portal into the narrative.29 For instance, slavery andits abolition, an obvious point of resonance for Haitian viewers, was accorded greater focus in Port-au-Prince.30 Local sorrow and injustice, and its
resolution, was tessellated in the halting, arc of progress that led to 1948. It
mapped its pedagogical and didactic function to those experiences which
had been felt and remembered, not merely learnt. Each viewer, in eachcountry, had a potential emotional vector to direct this narrative—as opposed
to being marched through an illustrated taxonomy of abuses and struggles.
UNESCO prepared a short filmstrip, comprising seventy-three frames,
designed to capture the meaning of the UDHR for all audiences, and anumber of thematic satellite films on topics including abolition and suffrage, which were drawn from the Human Rights Exhibition.31 Without areliable set of historical and contextual vocabulary shared by the peoplesof the world, the main film strip sought to communicate much of the message without text or narration, and relied almost entirely on highly emotive
juxtaposition and symbolism. The visual world was one of abstracted but
nevertheless disturbing representations of repression, the scenes populatedby anonymous and androgynous human figures, without distinctive nationalor regional particularities. Failures to secure human rights were shown inanimated format, alongside their resolution—a representation of the relevant
article of the new Declaration. It gave affective augmentation to the UDHR’s
austere preambular framing, and represented, in affective and universalistic
form, those proximate horrors of the war and tyranny that were only briefly
registered in the text itself.

29.
30.

31.

For details and description, see Radio UNESCO, Transcript of Interview, With Curator
Clive Entwistle, Human Rights Exhibition, 14 Oct. 1949, UNESCO Doc. D.328.
The Slaves Who Claimed Their Rights As Men: Les Droits de L’Homme at Port-Au-Prince,
III: 1 UNESCO Courier 11 (Feb. 1950); Les Droits de L’Homme (Feature Page), II: 10
UNESCO Courier 21 (Nov. 1949); UNESCO Exhibition—Album To Show Man’s Unending
Fight To Gain His Rights, & Films: A Universal Medium To Propagate a Universal Declaration & UNESCO Filmstrips Aid World-Wide Teaching of Human Rights Principles, III: 11
UNESCO Courier 6–8 (Dec. 1950); UNESCO Courier 8 (Dec.50); Supplement: Universal
Rights: UNESCO Exhibition Opens in Paris, II: 9 UNESCO Courier 5–8 (Oct. 1949);
Human Rights: UNESCO Exhibition in Paris, II: 8 UNESCO Courier 9 (Sept. 1949); W.E.
Williams, UNESCO Portrays History of Human Right[s], II: 4 Museum 201–205 (1949).
See also the more general observation, adjacent to the essay on Human Rights Exhibition
from Georges Henri Rivière, that a museum “mobilizes all the resources of art—and it
thus appeals to the emotions,” The Organization and Functions of the Museums, II: 4
Museum 206 (1949).
Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted 10 Dec. 1948, G.A. Res. 217A (III), U.N.
GAOR, 3d Sess., U.N. Doc. A/RES/3/217A (1948) [hereinafter UDHR]; 73 frames andattached guide (1949); UNESCO, Notes for Six Film Strips on Human Rights, UNESCO
Doc. WS/109.38. (c. 1949). See also the radio documentary, Norman Corwin, On the
Universal Declaration, U.N. Doc. A/777 (1949).

2017

Emotional Diplomacy and Human Rights

281

The effort to communicate the promise of the UDHR to the young was
especially emphatic, utilizing a plane that was more than juristic or philosophical. The official guidance for teachers, prepared in 1953, illustrated
a great many measures which orbited around immersion and emotional
modulation.32 According to contributors from England, these approaches,
despite their abandonment of close reference to the specific language of the
document, would convey its meaning with better fidelity than rote recitationof its principles, or instructor led exegesis. They cited the value of “plays,
dances, pantomimes, puppet shows, pageants and festivals” which held“an emotional appeal often lacking in other types of presentation.” While
it conceded a baseline of “laborious” blackboard work, there was obvious
enthusiasm for departing from even a simplified text as rapidly as possible,
and transitioning to a more experiential mode, when the “children present
and watch these displays,” they declared, “the scenes and acts will impress
their minds vividly, and will be reflected in their daily actions.”33 A Scottish teacher counseled that “to teach the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights” by textual literalism was “unsatisfactory.” Much like “a knowledge of
the Catechism does not necessarily make a good Christian,” there was theneed “to foster an attitude of mind” that reflected the spirit of the UDHR.34
Another example of this learning by feel approach was published in
1952, in A Fair World For All.35 Subtitled The Meaning of the Declaration of Human Rights, and prefaced by Eleanor Roosevelt, this remarkablycompelling work communicated the origins and meaning of the text to children and young adults through an ingenious emotional dialogue between
philosophical abstraction and feeling. Complex concepts on the natures of
the human person and society, and the perils of international cooperation,
were rendered with great parsimony and power via a lexicon that drewon experiences likely familiar and felt by the young. Illustrations included
common episodes from the playground, the classroom, and the home, andthe upsets and joys they induced, which were mapped upward to each of
the UDHR’s provisions.
As the final vote approached, across in the final night session of 9 and
10 December 1948, the representatives brought together in the Palais de
Chaillot acquired a collective demeanor. There was, according to Hernan
Santa Cruz, the Chilean jurist and academic who had played a substantial
role in the drafting process, a chamber “full of emotion,” and speeches“of sincerity and sombre eloquence.” In a quote excerpted widely in thedecades of memorialization that followed, Santa Cruz’s observation of “an
32.
33.
34.
35.

UNESCO, The Universal Declaration of Human Rights: A Guide for Teachers (1953).
Id. at 72.
Id. at 70. See also UNESCO, Some Suggestions on Teaching About Human Rights 44 (1968).
Dorothy Canfield Fisher, A Fair World For All: The Meaning of the Declaration of Human
Rights (1952).

282

HUMAN RIGHTS QUARTERLY

Vol. 39

atmosphere of genuine solidarity and brotherhood” has been taken as theshorthand for the anomalous, and evanescent, feeling that survived for a
handful of hours. This was a scene, he reported, perhaps already with anedge of sadness, “the like of which I have not seen again in any international setting.”36 The mood was shattered with the dissenting speech fromSouth Africa, and its flat dismissal of any notion of racial equality. Roosevelt
reported to her colleague, James Green, that she “could feel the chill in theair” as the words echoed across the Chamber.37 Privately, the South African
diplomats observed the mood as well, and complained of “a great deal ofsentimental and emotional thinking,” and the peril it represented to theirapartheid policy.38
The nature of the initial human rights enterprise, which was explicitly
one of exhortation, aspiration, and inspiration, was a hospitable habitat forhope. With the problems of translating the UDHR into law deferred to thelater drafting of a legally binding human rights covenant, hesitation, precision,and restraint were diminished amongst most of the legations—with the Westsomewhat more cautious. In comparative terms, however, optimism was theorder of the day for many, particularly delegations from the smaller states.
Sober assessments of domestic liabilities and administrative practicality, forinstance, were seemingly far from Colonel William Hodgson’s mind when heproposed a world court for human rights complaints. The Australian representative, known for his enthusiasm for whisky, was equally enthused about
universal, supra-state rights of appeal for every individual on the planet.39
The idea won several allies, and the astonishment of the major powers.
Hope and euphoria made for a bold and ambitious Declaration, butwere less helpful when drafting a human rights covenant with the force oflaw. The prime reservoirs of ambition, as had been the case in the UDHR,
were the smaller states, the nucleus of what would become the Third World,and Latin America. India was a partial exception. Its representative, the MP
and women’s rights advocate, Hansa Mehta, had sufficient experience ofdisappointment while in government. She set horizons low enough to befeasible, but far enough above the ground to remain meaningful. For session after session, and year after year, the Third World and their Latin US
counterparts pushed the covenant into fantastical realms—a document which
would secure health, housing, food, and clothing for the entire world, almost
36.
37.
38.

39.

Glendon, supra note 25, at 169.
United Nations Oral History, Transcript of Interview with James Green, Dag Hammarskjöld
Library, New York, 21 Apr. 1984, at 66.
The Deputy Permanent Representative of the Union of South Africa to the United Nations,[Secret] Comments on Draft International Declaration of Human Rights Presented to
the Economic and Social Council by the Human Rights Commission, P.M. 136/4/1 at 2
(BVV 22, 11/4/3, c.1948–1949, South African National Archives, Pretoria).
Annemarie Devereux, Australia and the Birth of the International Bill of Human Rights 179–86(2005).

2017

Emotional Diplomacy and Human Rights283

at the stroke of a pen. In its provisions for self-determination, adopted overnear unanimous Western opposition in 1950, the covenant proposed todecolonize the world instantaneously. Almost every debate became a clash
between those voting for total world transformation, and Western diplomats,and Mehta, counseling the need to be realistic.40
Throughout the 1950s, US assessments objected to the seemingly
unreasonable enthusiasm Third World delegations displayed for humanrights within General Assembly proceedings. Typically, their evaluation was
patronizing; Asian, Arab, Latin American, and African states were deeply
unrealistic, driven by “emotionalism,” as opposed to a clinical calculationof their domestic liabilities, parlous strategic situations, and material limits.
Executive Officer of the US Delegation to the General Assembly, James
Green, devoted much of his 1950 report to a taxonomy of the nascent
Third World and the politics of human rights and humanitarian issues that
had accompanied its increasing assertiveness. After a brief précis of the“victories and defeats” for US policy positions, he bluntly surmised that thebalance of outcomes for the US agenda “was heavily weighted on the sideof defeat.” These disappointing indices necessitated an explanation, mostof which centered on Green’s contention that Third World positions did
not obey the conventions of diplomacy as they had been assumed at Foggy
Bottom.41 When it came to human rights and humanitarian issues, Third
World representatives appeared “motivated by deep emotional convictions
rather than by the political considerations which are in evidence elsewherein the assembly.” On human rights questions, representatives took “pride
in discussing these problems on their own merits.”42 In this view, the Third
World was winning human rights battles, and pushing for an ambitious
agenda because they were passionate and unrealistic. They had rallied tothe utopian exhortations of the immediate post-war period too vigorously.
Furthermore, the “emotional” approach to diplomacy, exemplified by
Saudi delegate Jamil Baroody and Iraqi representative Badia Afnan, allowed
them access to a means of power that the more responsible states could not
adopt. Green opined that “spokesmen for the developed countries fought
40.

41.

42.

See, for instance, Mehta’s reporting on the Commission, which exemplified her mindfulness of how international commitments would have practical domestic implications,
Reports of the Commission on Human Rights, c. 1947–1952. (Hansa Mehta Papers,
Nehru Memorial Library and Museum [NMML], New Dehli.) Mehta, amongst the outstanding figures of the early UN, was quite a perceptive observer of sentiment within
the Commission, noting in particular when she had “upset” some of her counterparts,
and reading the disposition of the assembled legations, see for instance, on the questionof petitions, Human Rights Commission Report (Feb. 1947 NMML, New Delhi).
Memorandum by the Deputy Director of the Office of United Nations Economic andSocial Affairs (Green) to Mr. David Popper, Principal Executive Officer of the UnitedStates Delegation to the General Assembly, Washington, 22 Dec. 1950, II FRUS 1950
576 (1977).
Id. at 578.

284

HUMAN RIGHTS QUARTERLY

Vol. 39

valiantly,” yet they were “hampered… by logical, well-reasoned positions,”
which meant that “they were rarely as effective as those on the other side.”43
The US had arguments “which were well considered and entirely logicalbut which simply did not appeal to the emotional outlook of the majority,”
which led to defeat on issues such as continued funding for UNICEF, thefirst major rebuke to the West in the sphere of human rights and humanitarianism, and to losses on the shape of the draft Covenant.44 In another soulsearching session on the “emotionalism” problem, Ambassador Jessup asked
Roosevelt perhaps “whether we could not be emotional on our own side,”
to emotively sell the case for self-determination and other similar efforts interms that were aligned to US values.45 Polite nodding ensued, but with nodiscernible change in approach. With Roosevelt’s replacement by Eisenhower
ally Mary Pillsbury Lord, whose initial performance was shaky in both substance and sentiment, things did not improve. The new administration of
Dwight Eisenhower, pressured by the reactionary proponents of the Bricker
Amendment, which would have sharply curtailed executive treaty powers,
offered up the Covenant as a sacrifice.46 No longer able to participate in the
key pillar of the United Nations already foundering transformative project,
its human rights legation was compelled to press for a “technical” approachto human rights questions, with Lord advocating a desperately unpopular“advisory services program” of specialist expertise.47
III. “THE EMOTIONAL OUTLOOK OF THE MAJORITY”: THE TACTICALVALUE OF FANTASTIC OPTIMISM IN THE 1950S
Beneath the pejoration, however, US representatives had correctly identified
the aspirational affinity to human rights felt by many of those legations fromoutside the political West. A 1953 State Department planning document recognized that participants from the new states knew full well that their own
43.
44.
45.
46.
47.

Id.
Id. at 580.
Minutes of the Eighth Meeting of the US Delegation to the Seventh Regular Session of
the UN General Assembly, 28 Oct. 1952, New York City, Roosevelt & Black, supra note
2, at 961.
Richard O. Davies, Defender of the Old Guard: John Bricker and American Politics (1993);
Duane Tananbaum, The Bricker Amendment Controversy (1988).
James Green, The United Nations and Human Rights 703–05, 713–15 (1956); Memorandumby the Assistant Secretary of State for United Nations Affairs (Hickerson) to the Secretaryof State (Dulles), American Foreign Policy and The Promotion of Human Rights Throughthe United Nations (9 Feb. 1953); Secretary of State to the Consulate General at Geneva,
For Mrs Mary Lord: Statement before Senate Judiciary Committee (6 Apr. 1953); Press
Release, USUN, Statement made by the United States Representative (Mary Lord)
Before the Commission on Human Rights, Geneva (8 Apr. 1953), reproduced VII FRUS
1952–1954, United Nations Affairs 1536–1580 (1977).

2017

Emotional Diplomacy and Human Rights

285

conditions were inconsistent with the UDHR. These delegations, operatingwith wide autonomy, were often “educated in the liberal philosophy of theWest.”48 They were passionate and “emotional” precisely because they sought,with desperation, the promise of 1948. They were, in short, voting for hope.
On the whole the delegates from this area have inclined to press for a far-reaching
program of human rights, a program that reflects not so much measures which
their governments are prepared to realize . . . as it formulates ideal conditions
which these countries aspire to attain. . . . The votes . . . represent abstract,
ethical principles (sometimes embodied in their respective religions) which
they uphold in speeches in the UN often without any relationship whatsoever
to realities in their own countries.49

By the middle of the 1950s, with US defeats mounting on human rights
items, the State Department revisited the purportedly unreasoned crusadingof the Third World. Upon closer scrutiny, it found unrealistic enthusiasm
was less unreasonable.
After the emergence of a shared sense of identity amongst the new
independent states at the 1955 Asian-African Conference in Bandung, theState Department reviewed the perplexing influence this growing Third
World group held in human rights debates. It discovered that the characterof Third World activism on human rights was more political than it seemed.
Hope was eminently political. What was inexplicable in orthodox diplomatic
terms was logical when the interaction of the domestic and international was
considered: Arab, Asian, African, and Latin American legations had humanrights politics transcended their national polities.
Human rights questions have great symbolic value for many of the less-developed
countries, and their delegations consistently seek a position of leadership in thisfield. . . . In some cases, especially where governments tend to be unstable andconstitutions change frequently, an international legal commitment is regarded
by these governments as the only means to assure continuous recognition of ahuman rights principle.50

Recourse to the international by these Third World countries was evidence
less of unthinking emotionalism, but a rational strategy to address potentiallyfatal weaknesses within their states. Fledgling national institutions lacked the
durability to sustain human rights. This realization of domestic weakness bymany of those delegations, typically heavily comprised of individuals with
48.
49.
50.

Bloc Politics in the United Nations, Paper Prepared by the United Nations PlanningStaff, Bureau of United Nations Affairs, Washington, n.d., c. 1953, III FRUS, 1952–1954
120–121 (1983).
Id. at 121.
Program to Strengthen US Participation in UN General Assembly, Memorandum fromthe Assistant Secretary of State (Wilcox) to the Representative at the United Nations(Lodge), Washington, 7 May 1956, XI FRUS, 1955–1957 71 (1992).

286

HUMAN RIGHTS QUARTERLY

Vol. 39

academic or juristic background, in turn amplified the necessity for securing
the principles of human rights in a quaternary arm of government, above
and outside their borders. The State Department assessment observed thata vocal “enthusiasm for conventions,” which was especially evident among
those from Latin America, “frequently reflects fear that substantial gains may
be lost over-night if left to individual governments.”51 The US staff had cometo realize that pursuit of an aggressive international human rights project
was more complex than juvenile utopian posturing, or cynical professions ofpiety: the best hope was in being bizarrely hopeful of international action.
In one of the last bursts of this hopeful UN, the Convention on Consent
and Minimum Age for Marriage was proposed and adopted, with strong
support in particular from Marie Sivomey, a leading voice in Togo’s women’s
movement. Sivomey’s main ally, Jeanne Martin Cissé, Guinea’s representative, was an early star in the independence movement, and future chair of
the Security Council. Both had exceedingly high hopes for an internationaltransformation that reached all the way to the villages. Martin had high hopes
for what the universal convention would furnish to African women, whootherwise faced threadbare domestic protections. In a strikingly ambitious
exhortation for the draft text, Martin envisioned “African girls, knowing thatthey were protected by an international instrument, would not hesitate torefuse their consent to anyone who attempted to exert pressure on them.”52
When the draft was sharply critiqued by Nigeria’s delegation, Sivomey inparticular was deeply displeased—and, citing “emotion” as a disqualifier,delegated her reply to allies to ensure there was no loss of decorum, and nodamage to the prospects of adoption.53 It passed easily—and its two most
vocal opponents, Pakistan and Nigeria, placed in the increasingly embarrassing place sharing a voting position with South Africa, now a confirmed
international pariah after the appalling massacre at Sharpeville in March
1960.54 The global outrage that massacre had provoked, and the divergence
between the cool, calibrated non-response of the West, and the intense anger
and raft of sanctioning measures proposed by much of independent Africa,
had already presaged the emotional climate of the coming two decades ofUN activity.

51.
52.
53.
54.

Id.
Draft Convention and Draft Recommendation on Consent to Marriage, Minimum Ageof Marriage and Registration of Marriages, U.N. GAOR, 16th Sess., Agenda Item 85, ¶42, U.N. Doc. A/C.3/SR.1063 (1961).
Id. ¶ 49.
Tom Lodge, Sharpeville: An Apartheid Massacre and Its Consequences 163–279 (2011); PhilipFrankel, An Ordinary Atrocity: Sharpeville and Its Massacre (2001).

2017

Emotional Diplomacy and Human Rights

287

IV. RAGE: THE KINETIC HUMAN RIGHTS OF REVOLUTIONARY THIRDWORLDISM
In the aftermath of decolonization and the progressive radicalization of
once liberal nationalist regimes, hope was incrementally transmuted toanger as the dominant emotional register of human rights at the UN. Faith
in a steady, osmotic transmission of the values of the “new world” of 1948
was waning. Disgust at the ever expanding edifice of apartheid legislationand intensifying bloodshed and repression within Portuguese Africa, and Ian
Smith’s Unilateral Declaration of Independence delivered ample substrate
for rage. Paeans to armed struggle proliferated across the General Assembly,
its committees, and the assorted summits of the Non-Aligned Movement(NAM). Committees related to human rights and humanitarianism were
thick with anger from the national liberation movements (NLMs) and someof the Asian, African, and Arab bloc, and confected outrage, from their opportunistic Soviet friends. Increased participation by the NLMs, particularly
in lower level forums, such as the Special Committee of 24, and the Special
Committee on Apartheid, along with thematic summit meetings, brought
personnel to the UN who were genuinely angry, and indeed, had shed bloodfor the causes they advocated.55
Racial discrimination, which had damaged US and broader Western
credibility almost from the outset of the program, had exploded into thepremier topic of debate. It was a human rights abuse felt deeply by manyof the delegates, a number of whom had had family members harassed by
the New York police.56 In the first half of the 1960s, a collective crusade foranti-racism produced a meaningful advance: the 1965 International Convention on the Elimination of All-Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD),
which provided the first major, systematic binding convention on humanrights. ICERD expanded upon the principle of racial equality enunciatedin the UDHR and implied in the UN Charter, elaborating aspiration into a
catalogue of specific articles, and a meaningful implementation procedure
for those who opted to accede to it.57 But during the second half of the
1960s, and into the 1970s, this anger, entirely justified by any “rational”
metric of the misery under discussion, was transformed into something muchless amenable to universal human rights. Fused with, and exacerbated by,
55.

56.
57.

See, Report of the International Seminar on Apartheid, Racial Discrimination andColonialism in Southern Africa, Kitwe, Republic of Zambia 25 Jul.–4 Aug. 1967, (67–46381, Restricted, Pre-Publication Draft Subject to Revision); Report of the Seminar on
Apartheid held at Brasilia, 23 Aug.–4 Sep. 1966, ST/TAO/HR/27; The UN-OAU Conference on Southern Africa Oslo 9–14 Apr. 1973, vol. I (1974).
See, for example, Roosevelt & Black, supra note 1, at 642.
International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, adopted 21 Dec. 1965, G.A. Res. 2106 (XX), U.N. GAOR, 20th Sess., 660 U.N.T.S. 195(entered into force 4 Jan. 1969), reprinted in 5 I.L.M. 352 (1966).

288

HUMAN RIGHTS QUARTERLY

Vol. 39

another central conflict within the Assembly, that of the Arab-Israeli wars,
the two combined to produce a human rights program dense with violent
speech.58 While a shared efflorescence of hope had been the engine of the
1940s, an unshared anger—met with studious and sometimes dissembling
over-rationality and patronizing lectures on “emotionalism”—was the paralyzing impediment of the 1970s Assembly.
Racism was widely perceived as especially emotionally fraught. At the
September 1968 World Assembly of Human Rights NGOs, there was consensus that racism was “an emotion immune to reason,” which made its
resolution much less tractable to diplomatic compromise, juristic elegance,and specialist, technocratic counsel.59 It produced the kind of chasmic differences in approach and intonation that were ill-suited to an internationalorganization. For many of those who had felt it, there was no higher priority
than eliminating racial discrimination. Tanzanian President Julius Nyerere
declared outright that racism was a human rights abuse that trumped allothers and was perhaps the only human right that warranted a desperate
pursuit. Conversely, for those who sought a more symmetric and pragmatic
human rights program, the centrality of (purportedly) over-passionate antiracism was deeply unhelpful. Lady Dora Gaitskell, Britain’s representative
to the Commission, chided the crusade against racism, colonialism, andneo-colonial exploitation as a mortal threat to universalist human rights
promotion. Gaitskell warned that this monomaniacal approach, “the errorof obsession” as she termed it, was tactically unwise. It was “not always,”
she lectured, “the impatient, purely emotional approach to certain burning
issues that always makes for faster progress.”60 South Africa, Portuguese colonialism, and Israel were now the principal objects for repetitious, if quite
accurate, invective from the Third World and Soviet bloc that constituted
the bulk of the almost post-colonial General Assembly.
By the late 1960s, even resolutions which had no prospect of Westernsponsorship had decent prospects of adoption in a UN transformed bydecolonization: in a world where symbolic outrage trumped all, there wasno practical reason to cede any ground. Instead of working to map thearchitecture of universal human rights protections, the various UN bodies
became spaces for exhortation to the narrow cause of national liberation
by force of arms. Much of this new intonation was manifest at the First

58.
59.

60.

Paul Thomas Chamberlin, The Global Offensive: The United States, the Palestine Liberation
Organization and the Making of the Post-Cold War Order (2012).
Final Report of the International NGO Conference, Paris, 16–20 Sept. 1968, at 4. See
also the individual essays in the report from Jeanne Hersch, who spoke of “emotional
weaknesses” and their implied counterweight, “recourse to reason”; Frederick Nolde,
who spoke of canalizing emotions in pursuit of human rights, at 102, 110.
Dora Gaitskell, International Human Rights Year, 30 Nov. 1967 (UK National Archives,
Kew. FCO 61/228).

2017

Emotional Diplomacy and Human Rights

289

World Conference on Human Rights, held in the Shah’s Tehran in 1968. The
World Conference resolution on apartheid was a blunt expression of theabandonment of classic multilateral negotiating strategy.61 Representatives
from the African regional group, the main authors of the draft text, flatly
refused compromise or alteration on provisions which placed apartheid as
essentially the gravest human rights crime in all of human history. The pointof the resolution was the catharsis that came with maximalism. In December
1973, at the twenty fifth anniversary celebration for the UDHR, the thenchair of the Commission on Human Rights, Radna Ramphul (Mauritius),
was candid in his recognition of the emotional extremity of division thatnow prevailed. “In matters of human freedom,” he observed, “emotion andinstinct may often prevail over restraint and intelligence.”62
Confronted with a world of hostility and skepticism, the US State Department began to develop more acuity in the implications of emotion forhuman rights diplomacy. Across the second half of the 1970s, with Congressional initiatives on human rights, and most especially with the launchof President Carter’s public crusade for re-moralizing foreign policy, thediplomatic corps began to inform their briefings with detailed assessments ofsentiment. Planning for human rights items on the forthcoming UN agenda
identified emotions as a vital input to policy formation. The emotions themselves were usually presumed to be unsound by the US diplomats observing
them, but they were real enough that they had to be considered. In his 1978
recommendations for the session of the Commission Human Rights, the US
Ambassador to the UN (Geneva) Justice William Vanden Heuvel argued, “inparticular,” the United States should “be as forthcoming as possible on theissues which have the greatest emotional significance for the black African
delegations.”63 A forthright, empathetic stand was “key to the prospects forsatisfactory action” on broader US human rights priorities.64
On the other hand, US government views of South African resistancewere not always rendered in terms of universal justice and international
legality, and instead cited the passions of the black population. A notionallyexpert assessment on the disposition of the black majority population wasdelivered to Secretary of State Cyrus Vance in 1977 by US Ambassador William Bowdler. He described the rising youth rebellion, which had exploded
in Soweto the preceding year, as “based more on emotional than reasoned
conviction,” and with some of the protestors, “poorly informed.”65 Although
61.
62.
63.
64.
65.

Roland Burke, From Individual Rights to National Development: The First UN International
Conference on Human Rights, Tehran, 1968, 19 J. World Hist. 275 (2008).
Special Meeting to Commemorate the Twenty-Fifth Anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, in the Course of Which the United Nations Human Rights Prizes
Will be Awarded, U.N. GAOR, 28th Sess., ¶ 66, U.N. Doc. A/PV.2195 (1973).
US Mission, Geneva, to Secretary of State, 34th Human Rights Commission, Feb. 1978,
201416Z, AAD (Electronic Telegram Archive, Department of State).
Id.
US Embassy, Pretoria, to Secretary of State, Black Attitudes, Mar. 1977, 101335Z, AAD.

290

HUMAN RIGHTS QUARTERLY

Vol. 39

Bowdler presented a reasonably acute description of the state of the country,
given that even the most informed observers regarded Bantu Education, thekey precipitating factor in the Soweto Uprising, as deeply unjust, the intonation of his voluminous report was arguably too close to condescension.
Often the US policy makers’ newly found appreciation for feelings lapsed
into unhelpful stereotype, especially when it came to assessing Asian, African,
Arab, and Latin American human rights policymaking.66 Latin America, anearly and worthy target for bilateral human rights initiatives, had its emotional state polled frequently by the State Department. The reports wandereddangerously close to caricature. Argentina, for instance, was described asa wayward dependant in need of cautious management, petulant whencriticized, and in need of assiduous tending. Embassy reporting in 1978, in
the wake of modest Administration and Congressional pressure on the brutal
military regime of Jorge Videla (then engaging in torture and disappearance),found a rich vein of cliché.67 So too were the assessments of South Asia,
where the seriousness of purpose exhibited by Assistant Secretary of State
for Human Rights, Patricia Derian, apparently risked hurting the feelings ofthe Marcos regime.68
V. DESPAIR: THE PATCHWORK HUMAN RIGHTS OF EMOTIONAL
MOBILIZATION
By the late 1960s and early 1970s, in the campaigns of a vigorous new NGO
movement, another emotion revivified an increasingly shopworn humanrights idea. It was a return to the emotional register that had characterized
activisms of the distant past, reminiscent of the meticulous documentationof atrocity in the Belgian Congo, made famous by the foundational figuresof humanitarianism, Roger Casement and Edmund Morel, or the manacles
and assorted props of misery exhibited by the abolitionist pioneers of the
66.

67.

68.

In some ways, despite dealing with a very different realm of diplomacy, this built uponpre-existing patterns of infantilized understanding of Third World leaders in US foreign
relations circles. See notably the case of Iranian Prime Minister Mossadeq, discussed
in Mary Ann Heiss, Empire and Nationhood: The United States, Great Britain, and Iranian Oil,
1950–1954 (1997).
For illustrative example, see US Embassy, Buenos Aires, to Secretary of State, Human
Rights: Note of Protest, Aug. 1978, 040032Z; Continuing Reaction to US Human Rights
Sanctions Policy, Aug. 1978, 292148Z; Protest of Secretary Vance’s Statement, Mar.
1977, 021610Z; see also US Embassy, Brasilia, to Secretary of State, Possible Trip ofMrs. Carter, Mar. 1977, 191930Z, AAD.
See the exchanges across US Embassy, Manila, to Secretary of State, Romulo on Human
Rights Report, Mar.1977, 290836Z; Secretary of State, to US Embassy, Manila, Approach
to Government of Philippines, Apr. 1978, 110114Z; US Embassy, Manila, to Secretaryof State, Human Rights: Assistant Secretary Derian’s Meeting with President Marcos,
Jan. 1978 130908Z, AAD.

2017

Emotional Diplomacy and Human Rights

291

Clapham Sect. Built around an effort to outlaw torture, it worked with thepotent mixture of revulsion and perverse popular fascination that accompanied the precise description of grotesque abuses against persons.69 Graphic
rendering, textual and sometime visual, of human rights abuses, primarily
torture—often with implied or outright sexual violence—was the catalyst
which revitalized human rights, with an energy borne of pessimism anddesperation. Disgust and outrage reactivated the same kind of communityof sympathy as the Congolese Reform Association of the Victorian and Edwardian period, or nineteenth-century transatlantic abolitionism, one withthe limited objective of restricting and eliminating a particularly appallinghorror, rather than building a radical or hopeful new world. In the tortureof authoritarian regimes, AI and its allies had found their Jean Calas.70 Thisemotional hook became a moral drift net, drawing in tens of thousands of
middle US supporters, disgusted, angered, but seemingly obsessed with thepain of others. With an engine powered by sympathy, empathy, and, perhaps,
a level of self-satisfied redemption, anti-torture transformed human rights
diplomacy, for good and ill.
This community of sympathy, while intrinsic to the milieu that generated
movements for human rights and humanitarianism, could produce paradoxical results. In the human rights “boom” of the late 1970s, and well into the
1980s, the desperation to do something, anything, for the plight of victims
encouraged the selection of cases, causes, and remedies that provided a highimmediate emotional yield. Human rights activism became over weighted inaffect, and simultaneously, cachexic in aspirations to grand scale emancipation. The new emotional register was despair and revulsion. Human rights inthe mass revival period was a movement that operated primarily in the realmof individuated pathos; the transformational promise of an institutionalized
human rights system, built upon ethos and logos, as well as pathos, wasmoved to the edges. The United Nations Convention Against Torture (CAT),
finally adopted in 1984, was the culmination of these efforts, and in many
respects, represented a retreat from the Covenants, let alone the UDHR.71
Those preceding instruments, from 1948 and 1966, both banned torture in

69.

70.
71.

Barbara Keys, Anti-Torture Politics: Amnesty International, the Greek Junta, and theOrigins of the Human Rights “Boom” in the United States, in The Human Rights Revolution:
An International History 201–22 (Akira Iriye, Petra Goedde, & William I. Hitchcock eds.,
2012); for illustrative example, see Amnesty Int’l, Report on Torture (1973); Amnesty Int’l,Campaign for the Abolition of Torture: Workshop on Human Rights, Report and Recommendations (Apr. 1975).
Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights: A History 70–112 (2007); see also Thomas W. Laqueur,
Bodies, Details, and the Humanitarian Narrative, in The New Cultural History 176 (Lynn
Hunt ed., 1989).
Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, adopted 10 Dec. 1984, G.A. Res. 39/46, U.N. GAOR, 39th Sess., U.N. Doc.
A/39/51 (1985), 1465 U.N.T.S. 85 (entered into force 26 June 1987).

292

HUMAN RIGHTS QUARTERLY

Vol. 39

expansive terms, and merely as one dimension of a human rights order.72
The global persistence of torture, and the obvious failure of that ambitious
vision of previous decades, forced a retreat by NGOs, and liberal states,
to more defensive normative terrain. Human rights activism was now too
pessimistic to hope for more.
Disturbingly vivid accounts of corporeal pain, acting on the most primal
empathy amongst living creatures, elevated one single article of the original
UDHR. Others which were less easily visualized languished in the absenceof passionate patronage. This asymmetry in activist impulse damaged theframe of universal, interdependent, and equal freedoms proposed in 1948:
the rise of “the integrity of the person” broke whatever residual integrity thehuman rights project of the 1940s retained. In the world of the 1970s and1980s NGOs, the successful prosecution of human rights activism needed abody. The most effective civil society actors were those who could literally
invoke the plight of individuals, ideally with an obvious affective connection.
In Argentina, the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, who openly claimed
both feeling and reason in their campaign on behalf of their “disappeared”
child victims of the right-wing military dictatorship, won a degree of currency and immunity via the dynamics of the emotional plane. Imagery of
bereft mothers pleading for those they had lost was the symbolic emotional
carapace for textual and legal initiatives against a regime which exhorted
traditional values—those of conservative Catholicism, and a raft of attachedpresumptions as to the proper arrangement of the family. Performing motherhood (as well as living it), disarmed the then-ruling military junta’s casethat human rights dissent was the satellite of left-wing armed insurgency:
this was human rights campaign shielded by real and strategic materialism.73
The Mothers won markedly wider public and international recognition thanthe equally brave legalistic dissents against the Argentine junta, which hadembarked on massive abuses, including its signature “disappearance” campaign of extrajudicial killing, with precious little effective opposition until
the mobilization of the Mothers. A habeas corpus filing from the bravely
conventional NGO, El Centro de Estudios Legales y Sociales, did not activate in the same way as a heartbroken mother with an image of her child,with a shuffling gait, drifting in a sorrowful reverie around a square. It wasa public performance, doubtlessly genuine, of immense distress. Words ona page from a bespectacled lawyer could not readily access this power.

72.
73.

UDHR, supra note 31, at art. 5; International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights,
adopted 16 Dec. 1966, G.A. Res. 2200 (XXI), U.N. GAOR, 21st Sess., art. 7, U.N. Doc.
A/6316 (1966), 999 U.N.T.S. 171 (entered into force 23 Mar. 1976).
Fernando J. Bosco, The Madres de Plaza de Mayo and Three Decades of Human Rights’
Activism: Embeddedness, Emotions, and Social Movements, 96 Annals Ass’n. Am. Geographers 342 (2006).

2017

Emotional Diplomacy and Human Rights

293

High emotionalism kept the human rights idea going, but at substantial
cost. The second of the revived Conventions era that followed the late 1970s“breakthrough” activated, quite literally, parental instinct. Paternalism was acommon charge levelled against humanitarians in particular, and, to a lesser
degree, human rights activists; the 1989 Convention on the Rights of theChild (CRC) built an internationally institutionalized system for it, as a kind ofrenovated sibling of the much older UNICEF. Protection of uniquely vulnerable victims with a high binding affinity for free floating humane sentiment:
this was now human rights. Like the CAT that preceded it, the CRC was aworthwhile achievement, but one that made more sense as a salvage effort.
In the late 1940s, UNICEF had made highly effective use of transnational
paternal and maternal sentiment, with campaigns which demonstrated theagency operating as a kind of globalized surrogate parent. At that point,
UNICEF was an emergency humanitarian mobilization, a palliative for war
time distress, addressing a transient legacy of the time before the UDHR
and what would become a remade world.74 A once emergency action to
remedy a bleak past was now a permanent feature and future: palliation wasa ceiling, not a floor, on hope. Full universalism, the promise of “a world
made new” had retreated to making the world possibly, slightly, less evil
for children, and preventing the most severe violations against the integrityof the person.
Emotion drove the program, but its preferential distribution contradicted
the vision of 1948. Anti-racism, anti-torture, and the protection of children
seemed to work with almost primal human dispositions, in a way that paid
recreation leave or legal personality did not. It was difficult to sustain thefiction of human rights as equal and interdependent when the heart said
(or was carefully and repeatedly told) otherwise. Some victims activatedsentiment. Some abuses activated outrage. Plenty did not seem to show
any signs of doing either. The rise of the thematic convention, in the CAT,and the special case human, in the CRC, which followed the 1970s NGO“breakthrough” sat uneasily with universal human rights. Some humans had
different rights, or a superset of them, privileged on the basis of their ability
to draw sympathy. It was precisely what the architects had tried to avoid in
the 1940s, with their insistence on interchangeable universal human rights
with a very modest recognition of a special (and transient) case with mothers and neonates.75
The acuity with which the new NGOs perceived the plight of individuals
was a sharp contrast to those more structural violations were only hazily
resolved, occluded by an unmistakable scotoma in the vision of much of
the movement. With only a handful of exceptions, human rights NGOs
ceded the field of structural human rights violations to states, a measure74.
75.

See generally Jennifer M. Morris, The Origins of UNICEF, 1946–1953 (2015).
See the special protection for mothers and children, a specific sub-clause in UDHR,
supra note 31, art. 25, which details broad social welfare provisions.

294

HUMAN RIGHTS QUARTERLY

Vol. 39

which produced profoundly destructive alternative visions, notably the
New International Economic Order and its associated sequels.76 Drafted byauthoritarian sovereigns, the response to global inequality and poverty wascrafted to be more sovereignty, and a solidarity between states, rather thanhumans.77 The imperatives of mobilization changed not only which victims
were selected, but the very meaning of human rights. It was almost a generalcase rule that the greater the abstraction, the less efficacious the mobilization. The more corporeal the abuse the better. Unlike the surplus of hopethat characterized the late 1940s, human rights after the 1970s operated
within a much darker emotional realm.
VI. LASSITUDE: THE CANALIZED AND CALIBRATED PASSIONS OF
MODERN HUMAN RIGHTSAt its moments of efflorescence and peak productivity, the post-war “newworld” of the 1940s and early 1950s, the anti-racism crusades of themid-1960s, and NGO-led revivals of the late 1970s and early 1980s, theemotional intensity of the human rights program appeared higher than it
did at other moments. A diplomatic style which drew less reluctantly on
appeals to shared feelings, common sympathies, and universal outrage, corresponded to meaningful activity. Its absence, or relative absence, tended tocorrespond to empty proceduralism and anergic legalism. This pattern does
not seem to have been confined to states, and is discernible in the effectsof the transition, evident across the 1990s, from pulsatile campaigning topermanent advocacy within Human Rights Non-Governmental Organizations(HRNGOs). The thoroughness with which the main HRNGOs have been
professionalized and formalized has entailed a trade-off. As these NGOs
have been incorporated into the institutions of national and international
governance, the requisite conventions and bureaucratic systems have tended
to deplete their emotional reservoir.78
The proceduralism of compliance checklists (with actual check boxes
for ticking), shadow reports, and heavily templated web forms have both
76.

77.
78.

Charter of Economic Rights and Duties of States, adopted 12 Dec. 1974, G.A. Res.
3281, U.N. GAOR, 29th Sess., Agenda Item 48, U.N. Doc. A/RES/29/3281 (1974); andthe Declaration on the Establishment of a New International Economic Order, adopted
1 May 1974, G.A. Res. 3201, U.N. GAOR, 6th Sess., Agenda Item 7, U.N. Doc. A/
RES/S-6/3201 (1974).
Roland Burke, Competing for the Last Utopia? The NIEO, Human Rights, and the World
Conference for the International Women’s Year, Mexico City, June 1975, 6 Human. 47,
54–57 (2015).
This is felt differently within the organizations themselves, where the nature of the work,and superimposed administrative systems, can create an exceptionally upsetting anddifficult environment. See, for instance, the field study of Stephen Hopgood, Keepers of theFlame: Understanding Amnesty International (2006).

2017

Emotional Diplomacy and Human Rights

295

bureaucratized outrage and secured its permanent presence.79 This newest
human rights advocacy, one with more modest emotional heft, and of what
often appears an almost pro-forma affect, seems at once less disruptive andmore significant. HRNGOs have parlayed mass emotional intensity into
durable, functional secretariats and perpetual activity, smoothing peaks ofoutrage into a more reliable energy. Unlike the other grand movements ofuniversalistic human sympathy, notably the relatively discrete project ofabolitionism, the sheer expanse of global human rights promotion arguably
requires a different equilibrium between instantaneous emotional punch andpermanent advocacy. It is uncertain whether there are feasible alternatives.
Nevertheless, this new equanimity of outrage contains risk: utopian visions have rested upon disruptively energetic hope or desperate revulsion.
Both of the post-war “breakthroughs,” of the 1940s, and of the 1970s, andthe intervening triumph over legislative racial discrimination, rested on a
volatile emotional substrate, even if the emotions were profoundly different. The emotional palette of the 1940s was hope; the 1960s, rage; that of
the 1970s was disgust, guilt, and sympathy. These elements remain in thecontemporary constellation of HRNGOs, and within states themselves, but atmuch lower amplitude. Passion is expended in discretely quantized parcels,transmuted into a shadow report, and politely but insistently presented at thevarious UN Treaty Bodies, and within the Universal Periodic Review.80 The
flattened tones and formalism of a PDF (invariably resized and compressed
for web browsing) are, at best, a counterintuitive heir to The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, the touchstone work of abolitionist
outrage. In the mid-twentieth century, Western diplomats drifted aimlessly
when pursuing a human rights advocacy that was self-consciously framedin the language of rationality, reasonableness, pragmatism, and modesty. It
remains to be seen whether the HRNGO movement which roused them willitself become imperiled by a surplus of reason.

79.

80.

For a provocative critique of the modern human rights NGO, see Stephen Hopgood, The
End Times of Human Rights (2013); various responses and discussion in Debating The Endtimesof Human Rights: Activism and Institutions in a Neo-Westphalian World (Doutje Lettinga &Lars van Troost eds., 2014).
Regarding the ritualized character of the UPR process, see Jane K. Cowan, The Universal
Periodic Review as a Public Audit Ritual: An Anthropological Perspective on Emerging
Practices in the Global Governance of Human Rights, in Human Rights and the Universal
Periodic Review: Rituals and Ritualism 42 (Hilary Charlesworth & Emma Larking eds., 2016);
Julie Billaud, Keepers of the Truth: Producing “Transparent” Documents for the Universal
Periodic Review, in id. at 63, 64.