The Unbordered Borders

It is particularly fitting that human rights should be paired in the title of this conference on borderlands and the poetics of applied social theory. Fitting because of many things, among them the origins, nature, and history of the modern human rights regime and the character and bearing of poetics. As is well known, the modern focus on human rights dates from World War II, which was and is seen as having been caused by borderlands--the borderlands, according to the constitution of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, that were defined by people's ignorance of each other's ways and lives; by suspicion and mistrust between and among peoples, because of their supposed differences; and by the borders of race, ethnicity, gender, religion, nationality, property, among others, as well as by the moral and social exclusion those borders represented and embodied. (1) When the human defilement which those exclusions permitted and even encouraged came to a state of suspended animation, the founders of the post-World War II international system, in a "never again" step of inspiration sought to begin an effort to rid the world of certain borders, to question the fixity of some, and to recommend a continuing interrogation of others, as a way of ensuring international peace and security. This ridding-the-world-of-war effort began by affirming that all human beings partake of an attribute called dignity and that, by virtue of that dignity, they enjoy indefeasible claims to certain rights--the right to work, to a fair trial, to social security, to freedom of thought, conscience and religion, to medical care, to assembly, to food, to freedom of speech, to education, to housing, to freedom of movement, to participate in the cultural life of the community, and, among others, to freedom from torture and degrading treatment. Then, in the majestic non-discrimination clause of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the authors of that document--on our behalf--said that everyone (not just Sri Lankans, Norwegians, or Eskimos, but everyone, without distinction of any kind such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origins, property, birth or other status, such as political, jurisdictional, or international standing) is entitled to all the rights mentioned. (2) Many have taken on the task of purportedly advancing the cause of human rights by abstractly reciting them and clamoring for their implementation. Some speak about one's right to free speech and democracy, for example, with a convenient forgetting of the right to education, which can promote the type of dialogical encounter that is sponsoring of liberatory, integrative construction and reconstruction of self and human societies. Others champion the right to freedom, but not the right to food, careless of the fact that the hungry are un-free, left as they are to the crushing dictates of their bellies; and still others, while claiming to be leaders in the cause of human rights, have consistently engaged in conduct that is subversive of the very dignity that the recognition of those rights is supposed to advance and protect. The worse violation of those rights, however, has not been any specific item of conduct, but the general disregard for their moral inclusiveness or, as some might prefer to phase it, the transcending of the moral exclusions that the human rights order (and the character and bearing of their poetics) was intended to ensure. That order says that the world is a single moral community or cosmopolis. In this community, the individual (not the state) is the basic unit, and the community of human beings is morally prior to the association of states. If individuals and not states (or the latter's social and other subdivisions) are the basic units of our universal community, then it follows that states can no longer be regarded as the principal reservoirs of international rights and responsibilities. …