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| 1 |
ID:
170432
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| Summary/Abstract |
Differences between various theories of human rights have so far been mainly those of within the same Western worldview, which has either ignored other viewpoints or treated them with condescension. To avoid abstract theorizing on the nature of human rights without studying concrete societies, which had previously existed or exist today, without the analysis of why some of them had become slave-owning societies while others had evolved into liberal-democracies, it is necessary to take historical and comparative approaches. Historically the emergence of human rights is related to the advent of centralized States in the Medieval Europe where those belonging to the class of nobles needed tools that would have justified their claims against the king becoming all-powerful. Both, human rights expressing the good that exists in humans, and human wrongs, reflecting the evil existing in the world and in us, are both equally human, though not necessarily humane. Human rights are social constructs that are called upon to respond to human needs and help remedy human wrongs. Some human rights may, indeed, become universal (namely, become universal, not to be such as God given or deriving from something called human nature), others may be universalisable, while the domain of application of certain rights may remain relatively restricted. While human beings, in essence (i.e. not superficially, as to the colour of their skin or slant of their eyes), are very much the same, societies differ hugely. Societal and cultural differences acquired during the tens of thousands of years long journey of the Homo Sapiens from an African village to all over the world cannot be overcome within decades or even centuries, if ever. There is no global village in the horizon and the world has not become flat.
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| 2 |
ID:
146669
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| Contents |
Since the Cold War, high—some would say naïve—expectations of a world in which law, impartially interpreted and applied, would have primacy over politics have not materialized. Differing visions of desirable and possible world orders are accompanied by propaganda warfare where even international law is used as a tool of hegemonic dominance or, on the contrary, as an instrument to counter such dominance. Instead of the Cold War rivalry between the liberal capitalistic and communist creeds, today the main competition is between ideologies justifying the continuation and expansion of the uni- or non-polar world with one centre of power, the world that has to become more and more homogeneous (liberal democratic), and a multi-polar balance of power world. This article argues that, taking account of the very size and even more so the cultural and developmental diversities, as well as the complexity and increasing reflexivity, of the world, the only realistically possible international system is a multi-polar one. Moreover, international law, as a normative system based on the balance of interests and compromises and not necessarily on shared ideology (this may underpin domestic legal systems or EU law), can function relatively well only in a multi-polar, balance of power, concert of powers system which is consciously and conscientiously built and accepted as legitimate. And though the processes of globalisation have a tendency to homogenize the world while making many, if not most, societies organized as states more heterogeneous, attempts to accelerate these processes are almost bound to be counter-productive.
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| 3 |
ID:
172960
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| 4 |
ID:
184553
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| Summary/Abstract |
Russia’s military operation in Ukraine, illegal in terms of the pre-1990s
international law and probably a geopolitical miscalculation, has caused
a shock incomparable even with that of the 2003 American attack on Iraq
that was proudly baptised Operation Shock and Awe. Remarkably, neither
the twenty-year-long war in Afghanistan waged by the U.S. and its allies, nor
the destruction of Libya in 2011, nor the multiple military interventions in
Africa, nor even NATO’s bombardment of Serbia in 1999—the first unlawful
use of force in post-WWII Europe—have caused such anger. There is always
a whiff of racism in the fact that wars waged against people who have
chosen to be on the “wrong side of history” are not condemned by those
on “right side of history” as they must be. How did it happen that after the
fall of the Berlin Wall and reasonable expectations of a peaceful future, the
world found itself in a situation where the use of military force has become
nearly normal unless it is used against Europeans who chose the “right
side of history”? How and why, in the race towards “the end of history” the
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