Rogue States

by Noam Chomsky

  Regular human rights reports provide sufficient testimony to the dismal story, which continues to the present, as always including the major powers. To mention only one current example, the “collateral damage” of the latest US-UK bombardment of lraq merits little notice,1 taking its place alongside the wanton destruction of a major African pharmaceutical plant a few months earlier, and other trivia.

  And trivia they are, viewed against the background of other exploits: in Washington’s “backyard,” for example, the liberal press was giving “Reagan & Co. good marks” for their support for state terror in El Salvador as it peaked in the early 1980s, urging that more military aid be sent to “Latin-style fascists . . . regardless of how many are murdered” because “there are higher American priorities than Salvadoran human rights,” and that Nicaragua be restored to the “Central American mode” of El Salvador and Guatemala under a “regional arrangement that would be enforced by Nicaragua ‘s neighbors,” the terror states then busy slaughtering their populations with US aid.2 The comments are from left-liberal sectors; the rest take a harsher line.

  Interpretations are different a step removed. A Jesuit-organized conference in San Salvador considered the state terrorist project that peaked in the 1980s and its continuation since then by the socioeconomic policies imposed by the victors. Its report noted the effect of the residual “culture of terror” on “domesticating the expectations of the majority vis-a-vis alternatives different to those of the powerful.”3 The great achievement of the terror operations has been to destroy the hopes that had been raised in the 1970s, inspired by popular organizing throughout the region, the overthrow of the Somoza dictatorship, and the “preferential option for the poor” adopted by the Church, which was severely punished for this deviation from good behavior.

  The Jesuit report generalizes to much of the Third World; and also to growing numbers at home, as the Third World model of sharply two-tiered societies is internationalized. The real world was captured in remarks by the secretary-general of UNCTAD, which was established “to create an international trading system consistent with the promotion of economic and social development.” Representing the UN at the 50th anniversary of the world trade system (GATT, WTO, etc.), he observed that “no one should be fooled by the festive atmosphere of these celebrations. Outside there is anguish and fear, insecurity about jobs, and what Thoreau described as ‘a life of quiet desperation.’”4 The event received ample coverage, but the media preferred the festive atmosphere within.

  The devastating consequences of Hurricane Mitch in October 1998 were graphically reported, but not their roots in the “economic miracle” instituted by “Latin-style fascists” guided by US experts—a development model geared towards a “high level of poverty and [of] favoritism towards the minority while the majority has just the minimum to survive,” a conservative Honduran bishop observed, condemning new programs that will perpetuate the disaster. He was quoted in a rare discussion of its causes by a veteran Central America journalist who observes that hopes for change were terminated by the US-trained armies that “caused the disappearance of the most vocal proponents of sharing the land,” along with hundreds of thousands of others.5

  A fuller picture is far more grim, and instructive, but I will put it aside.

  The direct impact of the hurricane is reviewed in the research journal of the Jesuit University in Managua. The analysts ask: “Did Mitch have a class bias?” The hurricane had a devastating effect on poor farmers, who “have been pushed into the most ecologically fragile zones, those least appropriate for agriculture”: Posoltega, for example, the site of the murderous mudslide that horrified the world. A few miles away, the San Antonio refinery, “one of Nicaragua’s most emblematic economic emporiums,” made out well, as did agro-export industries generally, benefitting from the rains on the fertile soil they monopolize. Basic crop production (corn and beans) was ruined, a disaster for the farmers and the general population. Reconstruction is directed to magnifying the same distinctions in a “New Nicaragua,” highly regarded for its impressive economic growth, while the population sinks to Haitian levels. That includes funds from abroad as well as the domestic institutions, redesigned to satisfy the requirements of the international financial institutions. Credit, research, and policy generally are being directed even more than before to provide “services exclusively to those who can pay for them,” undermining what is left of agrarian reform. “The class bias” of the hurricane and the aftermath is not “divine will or [a] mythical curse against the poor,” but “the result of very concrete social, economic, and environmental factors.”6 The story again generalizes to much of the world.

  A side effect of the hurricane was to scatter tens of thousands of land mines that are a relic of the Nicaraguan component of Washington’s terrorist wars of the 1980s. Fortunately, a team of de-mining experts was sent to help—from France. The facts were reported in the pacifist press.7 The lack of concern in a more obvious place is not surprising in view of the reaction to far more extreme human rights violations of a similar sort, proceeding as we meet. Perhaps the most striking example is the human toll of the anti-personnel weapons littering the Plain of Jars in Laos, the scene of the heaviest bombing of civilian targets in history, it appears, and arguably the most cruel: this furious assault on a poor peasant society had little to do with Washington’s wars in the region.

  New Rights?

  Let us move on to the general setting in which the rights that have been sought gain their life and substance.

  The UD broke new ground in significant respects. It enriched the realm of enunciated rights, and extended them to all persons. In a major law review essay on the 50th anniversary, Harvard law professor Mary Ann Glendon observes that the Declaration “is not just a ‘universalization’ of the traditional 18th-century ‘rights of man,’ but part of a new ‘moment’ in the history of human rights . . . belong[ing] to the family of post-World War II rights instruments that attempted to graft social justice onto the trunk of the tree of liberty,” specifically Articles 22- 27, a “pillar” of the Declaration “which elevates to fundamental rights status several ‘new ‘ economic, social, and cultural rights.” It is fair to regard the UD as another step towards “recovering rights” that had been lost to “conquest and tyranny,” promising “a new era to the human race,” to recall the hopes of Thomas Paine two centuries ago.8

  Glendon stresses further that the UD is a closely integrated document: there is no place for the “relativist” demand that certain rights be relegated to secondary status in light of “Asian values” or some other pretext.

  The same conclusions are emphasized in the review of the human rights order issued by the United Nations on the 50th anniversary of the Charter, and in its contribution to the first World Conference on Human Rights at Vienna in June 1993. In his statement opening the conference, the secretary-general “stressed the importance of the question of interdependence of all human rights.” Introducing the 50th-anniversary volume, he reports that the Vienna conference “emphasized that action for the promotion and protection of economic and social and cultural rights is as important as action for civil and political rights.”9

  The Vatican took a similar stand in commemorating the 50th anniversary of the UD. In his 1999 New Year’s Day message, Pope John Paul II denounced Marxism, Nazism, fascism, and, “no less pernicious,” the ideology of “materialist consumption” in which “the negative aspects on others are considered completely irrelevant” and “nations and peoples” lose “the right to share in the decisions which often profoundly modify their way of life.” Their hopes are “cruelly dashed” under market arrangements in which “political and financial power is concentrated,” while financial markets fluctuate erratically and “elections can be manipulated.” Guarantees for “the global common good and the exercise of economic and social rights” and “sustainable development of society” must be the core element of “a new vision of global progress in solidarity.”10<
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  A tepid version of the Vatican’s “post-liberation theology,” as it is called, is admissible into the free market of ideas, unlike the liberation theology it replaces. The latter heresy “is almost, if not quite, extinct,”11 commentators inform us. The modalities of extinction have been consigned to their proper place in history, along with the archbishop whose assassination opened the grim decade of Washington’s war against the Church and other miscreants, and the leading Jesuit intellectuals whose assassination by the same US-backed “Latin-style fascists” marked its close. The two theologies differ in one particularly critical respect. The “preferential option for the poor” that somehow became extinct encouraged the poor to participate in shaping their own social world, while the tolerable version of the replacement asks them only to plead with the rich and powerful to share some crumbs. In the tolerable version, the Church is to “rattle the conscience” of the rich and powerful, instructing them in “Catholic values of generosity and self-sacrifice” instead of organizing Christian base communities that might offer people a way to exercise the “right to share in the decisions which often profoundly modify their way of life” that has been transmuted to a plea for more benevolent rule as it passed through the doctrinal filters.

  Glendon observes that recent discussion is mistaken in supposing that socioeconomic and cultural rights were included in the UD “as a concession to the Soviets”: on the contrary, support was “very broad-based.” We may recall that such ideals were deeply entrenched in anti-fascist popular forces in Europe and in the colonial world, and among the population of the United States as well. These facts were profoundly disturbing to US political and economic elites, who had a different vision of the world they intended to create. They expressed their concerns about “the hazard facing industrialists” at home in “the newly realized political power of the masses,” and about the “new aspirations” among populations abroad who were “convinced that the first beneficiaries of the development of a country’s resources should be the people of that country” rather than US investors. The steps taken to overcome these hazards constitute major themes of post-war history, matters that I have to put aside here, despite their evident relevance.

  There were some, of course, who dismissed the UD with contempt as just a “collection of pious phrases,” the oft-quoted remark of Soviet delegate Andrei Vyshinsky, whose own record need not detain us; or as “a letter to Santa Claus. . . . Neither nature, experience, nor probability informs these lists of ‘entitlements,’ which are subject to no constraints except those of the mind and appetite of their authors”—in this case, Reagan’s UN ambassador, Jeane Kirkpatrick, deriding the socioeconomic and cultural provisions of the UD. A few years later, Ambassador Morris Abram described such ideas as “little more than an empty vessel into which vague hopes and inchoate expectations can be poured,” a “dangerous incitement,” and even “preposterous.” Abram was speaking at the UN Commission on Human Rights, explaining Washington’s rejection of the right to development, which sought to guarantee “the right of individuals, groups, and peoples to participate in, contribute to, and enjoy continuous economic, social, cultural and political development, in which all human rights and fundamental freedoms can be fully realized.” The US alone vetoed the Declaration, thus implicitly vetoing the Articles of the UD that it closely paraphrased.12

  Despite the relativist onslaught, the UD is surely worth defending. But without illusions: the world’s most powerful state has been a leader of the relativist camp, and even within the subcategory of human rights it professes to uphold, “there is a persistent and widespread pattern” of abuses, Amnesty International concludes in a recent review.13

  The Economic Order and Human Rights

  The human rights regime was one of three related pillars of the New World Order established by the victors in the aftermath of World War II. A second was the political order articulated in the UN Charter; the third the economic order formulated at Bretton Woods. Let us take a brief look at these components of the projected international system, focusing on the human rights dimension.

  The Bretton Woods system functioned into the early 1970s, a period sometimes called the “Golden Age” of post-war industrial capitalism, marked by high growth of the economy and progress in realizing the socioeconomic rights of the UD. These rights were a prominent concern of the framers of Bretton Woods, and their extension during the Golden Age was a contribution to translating the UD from “pious phrases” and a “letter to Santa Claus” to at least a partial reality.

  One basic principle of the Bretton Woods system was regulation of finance, motivated in large part by the understanding that liberalization could serve as a powerful weapon against democracy and the welfare state, allowing financial capital to become a “virtual Senate” that can impose its own social policies and punish those who deviate by capital flight. The system was dismantled by the Nixon administration with the cooperation of Britain and other financial centers. The results would not have surprised its designers.

  For the major industrial powers, the period since has been marked by slower growth and the dismantling of the social contract, notably in the US and Britain. In the US, the recovery of the ‘90s was one of the weakest since World War II and unique in American history in that the majority of the population has barely recovered even the level of the last business cycle peak in 1989, let alone that of a decade earlier. The typical family puts in 15 weeks of work a year beyond the level of 20 years ago, while income and wealth have stagnated or declined. The top 1 percent has gained enormously, and the top 10 percent have registered gains, while for the second decile, net worth—assets minus debt—declined during the recovery of the 1990s. Inequality, which steadily reduced during the Golden Age, is returning to pre-New Deal levels. Inequality correlates with hours of work. In 1970, the US was similar to Europe in both categories, but it now leads the industrial world in both, mostly by wide margins. It is alone in lacking legally mandated paid vacation. Open government complicity in corporate crime during the Reagan years, sometimes accurately reported in the business press, and continuing since, has severely undermined labor rights. All this proceeds in direct conflict with the UD—that is, with the parts that are denied status under the prevailing relativism.14

  The press regularly reports “an age of almost unparalleled prosperity” in the US that Europe should aspire to emulate, and a “remarkably successful US economy.”15 The reports are based primarily on “the return on capital achieved by American companies”—which has indeed been “spectacular,” as the business press has been exulting through the Clinton years—and the vast increase in stock prices, which has conferred remarkable prosperity upon the 1 percent of families who own almost half the stock and the top 10 percent who hold most of the rest, and who jointly are the beneficiaries of 85 percent of the gains of asset values in the “fairy tale economy.” Good deeds do not pass unnoticed. President Clinton was “likened to Martin Luther King, Jr. and generally celebrated at a Wall Street conference” in mid-January 1999, the press reported, citing the president of the New York Stock Exchange, who “told Mr. Clinton that Dr. King was surely smiling down on the gathering” at the annual King memorial, recognizing how Clinton had benefited “my little comer of southern Manhattan.”16

  Other little comers fared somewhat differently.

  The fairy tale was attributed in part to “greater worker insecurity” by Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan, citing a near-doubling of the proportion of workers fearing layoffs in large industries from 1991 to 1996. Other studies reveal that 90 percent of workers are concerned about job security. In a 1994 survey of working people, 79 percent of respondents said efforts to seek union representation are likely to lead to firing, and 41 percent of non-union workers said they think they might lose their own jobs if they tried to organize. Decline in unionization is generally taken by labor economists to be a significant factor in the stagnation or decline of wages and the deterioration of working co
nditions.17

  Polls also report “consumer confidence”; it is tempered, however, by the observation that “expectations have diminished.” The director of the University of Michigan’s Survey Research Center comments that “it is a little like people are saying, ‘I am not earning enough to get by, but it is not as bad as it could be,’ while in the ‘60s they thought, ‘How good can it get?’ “18

  For the “developing world,” the post-Bretton Woods era has been largely a disaster, though some escaped, temporarily at least, by rejecting the “religion” that markets know best, to borrow the words of the chief economist of the World Bank. He points out that the “East Asian miracle,” which is “historically unprecedented,” was achieved by a significant departure from the prescribed formulas, though its rising star, South Korea, was badly damaged after agreeing to liberalization of finance in the early ‘90s, a significant factor in its current crisis, he and many other analysts believe, and a step towards “Latin Americanization.” Latin American elites experience far greater inequality and a “weaker sense of community than found among nationalistic East Asian counterparts,” and are “connected more with foreign high finance”—factors that enter into their “avid pursuit of European and US high-style consumption and high culture,” international economist David Felix points out. “Mobile wealth has also enabled Latin America’s wealthy to veto progressive taxes and limit outlays on basic and secondary education while extracting generous state bailouts when suffering financial stress,” a typical feature of free market doctrine for centuries.19

  In his highly regarded history of the international monetary system, Barry Eichengreen brings out a crucial difference between the current phase of “globalization” and the pre-World War I era that it partially resembles.20 At that time, government policy had not yet been “politicized by universal male suffrage and the rise of trade unionism and parliamentary labor parties.” Hence the severe costs of financial rectitude imposed by the “virtual Senate” could be transferred to the general population. But that luxury was no longer available in the more democratic Bretton Woods era, so that “limits on capital mobility substituted for limits on democracy as a source of insulation from market pressures.” It is therefore natural that the dismantling of the post-war economic order should be accompanied by a sharp attack on substantive democracy and the principles of the UD, primarily by the US and Britain.