Human Rights are universal — not pro-European, Western nor anti-Asian
In 1997 economist Amartya Sen published his article “Human Rights and Asian Values”. One of the main conclusions of Professor Sen was to explain that ideas of human rights and similar older ideas through history are not “Western” nor “anti-Asian”.
Sen started his article by referring to philosopher and liberal thinker Thomas Paine and his book “Common Sense” where Sen wrote that for Paine, political freedom and democracy were valuable everywhere, even though they were being violated nearly everywhere too. In 1997, the violation of freedom and democracy was taking place in different parts of the world but comparing to Paine’s lifetime during the 18th century the violation of freedom and democracy is based on a new class of arguments denying the universal importance of freedoms. According to Sen’s writings, the most prominent of these contentions is the claim that Asian values do not give freedom the same importance as it is accorded in ”the West” as in Europe and America.
Sen wrote that several official delegations stressed cultural and value differences between Asia and the Westat the 1993 World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna. One example was the foreign minister of Singapore Wong Kan Sneg , who warned that “universal recognition of the ideal of human rights can be harmful if universalist is used to deny or mask the reality of diversity”. Another example was the Chinese delegation played a leading role in emphasising regional differences and in making sure that the prescriptive framework adopted in the declarations made room for regional diversity.
The main focus of Sen’s writing was to analyse and examine the thesis that “Asian values” were less supportive of freedom and more concerned with order and discipline than are “Western values”, and that the claims of human rights in the areas of political and civil liberties are, therefore, less relevant in Asia than in the West. Sen referred at several places in his article to Lee Kuan Yew, the former prime minister of Singapore and promoter of “Asian values,” who defended authoritarian arrangements on the ground of their alleged effectiveness in promoting economic success.
Asian Values and Economic Development
In this part of his article, Sen argued there was little general evidence that authoritarian governance and the suppression of political and civil rights are beneficial in encouraging economic development. Also, Sen wrote that the statistical picture at that time was much more complex since systematic empirical studies gave no real support to the claim that there is a conflict between political rights and economic performance.
Furthermore, Sen stated that since political liberty and individual freedom have the importance of their own, and that the case for them remains untarnished. The economic policies and circumstances that led to the economic success of East Asian economies as South Korea and China were based on aspects, as Sen wrote, on a list of “helpful policies, ” among them an openness to competition, the use of international markets, a high level of literacy and school education, successful land reforms, and public provision of incentives for investment, exporting, and industrialisation
Sen also stated it was also important to look at the connection between political and civil rights, on the one hand, and the prevention of major disasters, on the other. According to Sen, political and civil rights give people the opportunity to draw attention forcefully to general needs and to demand appropriate public action.
Asia as a unit
Sen argued that because of Asia’s geography and continental size, there were no quintessential values that apply to Asia due to its this immensely large area and heterogeneous population. Sen also wrote that the temptation to see Asia as one unit reveals, in fact, a distinctly Eurocentric perspective.
Furthermore, Sen wrote that in practice, the advocates of “Asian values” have tended to look primarily at East Asia as the region of particular applicability and that the generalisation about the contrast between the West and Asia often concentrates on the land to the east of Thailand. For example, Lee Kuan Yew outlined “the fundamental difference between Western concepts of though Indian culture also emphasises similar values” while in fact, as Sen wrote it, East Asia itself has much diversity, and there are many variations between Japan and China and Korea and other parts of East Asia.
Sen also wrote that even the 2.8 million people of Singapore at that time, had vast variations in their cultural and historical traditions, despite the fact that conformist surrounding Singapore’s political leadership and the official interpretation of Asian values is compelling this time.
Freedom, Democracy and Tolerance
In this part of his article, Sen wrote that the advocates of Asian particularism often — explicitly or by implication — assert that there is a shared mistrust of the claims of liberal rights in Asia while the same time, the authoritarian lines of reasoning often receive indirect backing from modes of thought in the West itself. Sen wrote that there was a tendency in the United ‘States and Europe to assume that the primacy of political freedom and democracy as a fundamental and ancient feature of Western culture is not easily found in Asia.
According to Sen, values spread by the European Enlightenment and other relatively recent developments cannot be considered part of the long-term Western heritage, experienced in the West over millennia. Here, Sen referred to liberal thinker Isaiah Berlin and wrote that answer to the question when and under what circumstances “the notion of individual liberty first became explicit in the West,” Berlin himself wrote that:
“I have found no convincing evidence of any clear formulation of it in the ancient world.”
However, with references to sociologists Orlando Patterson, Sen argued that there is evidence supporting that ideas similar to freedom and tolerance could be found particularly Greece and Rome and in the tradition of Christianity. Sen also referred to Aristotle writings where Aristotle was intellectually supporting the importance of ideas similar to the modern understanding of freedom, while Aristotel at the same time was in favour of exclusion of women and slaves. Sen also wrote that even in societies in Asia , freedom could be valued for the privileged, in much the same way freedom is valued for non-slave men in corresponding Greek conceptions of a good society.
Order and Confucianism
In this part of his article, Sen wrote that it is by no means clear to me that Confucius is more authoritarian in this respect than, say, Plato or St. Augustine, while the real issue is not whether these non-freedom perspectives are present in Asian traditions, but whether the freedom-oriented perspectives are absent there? Sen stated that an obvious example was the role of Buddhism as a form of thought because in the Buddhist tradition, great importance is attached to freedom, and the part of the earlier Indian theorising to which Buddhist thoughts relate has much room for volition and free choice.
Furthermore, Sen wrote that “Confucius did not recommend blind allegiance to the state” and that Confucius ideas do not forgo the recommendation to oppose a bad government. Another example of ideas similar to freedom was according to Sen existing in articulations of the need for tolerance on an egalitarian in the writings of India based Emperor Ashoka, who in the third century before modern time counting (formerly as BC or “before Christ”). Ashoka converted to Buddhism and emphasised the importance of tolerance, both in public policy by the government and in the behaviour of citizens to each other.
Akbar and the Moghuls
Sen wrote that Indian social traditions contain a variety of views and reasonings which in different ways include arguments in favour of tolerance, in defence of freedom, and even, in the case of Ashoka supporting of equality at a very basic level.
Another example according to Sen, when it comes to diversity in India, was the great Moghul emperor Akbar, who reigned between 1556 and 1605. Sen wrote that while Akbar was not a democrat he did emphasise the acceptability of diverse forms of social and religious behaviour, and who accepted, in modern understanding, human rights of various kinds, including freedom of worship and religious practice, rights would not have been easily tolerated in parts of Europe in Akbar’s time.
Furthermore, while Ashoka combined this with his Buddhist pursuits, Akbar tried to combine the distinct religions of India, incorporating the “good points” of different religions. Sen wrote that Akbar’s court was filled with Hindu as well as Muslim intellectuals, artists, and musicians, and he tried in every way to be nonsectarian and symmetric in the treatment of his subjects.
Concluding remarks
In the final parts of his article, Sen pointed put that discussing all this is to indicate the presence of conscious theorising about tolerance and freedom insubstantial and important parts of Asian tradition and that we could consider many more illustrations of this phenomenon in writings from early Arabic, Chinese, Indian, and other cultures.
For Sen, the championing of democracy and political freedom in the modern sense cannot be found in the pre-Enlightenment tradition in any part of the world — the West or the East. The view that the basic ideas underlying freedom and rights in a tolerant society are “Western” notions, and somehow alien to Asia, was according to Sen hard to make any sense of, even though both Asian authoritarians and Western chauvinists have championed that view
Sen also wrote that the championing of Asian values is often associated with the need to resist Western hegemony such as by referring to anticolonialism to buttress the assault on basic political and civil rights in postcolonial Asia. For example, Lee Kuan Yew has emphasised the special nature of Asian values and has made powerful use of the general case for resisting Western hegemony to bolster the argument for Asian particularism. But this rhetoric, according to Sen extended to the defiant declaration that Singapore is “not a client state of America”.
Sen position in the article was in the most general form, the notion of human rights builds on our shared humanity since these rights are not derived from the citizenship of any country or the membership of any nation, but taken as entitlements of every human being. Human rights differ from constitutionally created rights guaranteed for specified people as for American citizens.
Therefore, according to Sen, since the conception of human rights transcends local legislation and the citizenship of the person affected, it is not surprising that support for human rights can also come from anyone — whether or not she is a citizen of the same country as the person whose rights are threatened. For example, a foreigner does not need the permission of a repressive government to try to help a person whose liberties are being violated. Indeed, in so far as human rights are seen as rights that any person has as a human being and not as a citizen of any particular country, the reach of the corresponding duties can also include any human being, irrespective of citizenship.
Finally, Sen argued that there is a lot we can learn from studies of values in Asia and Europe, but they do not support or sustain the thesis of a grand dichotomy. He stated that contemporary ideas of political and personal liberty and rights have taken their present form relatively recently, and it is hard to see them as “traditional” commitments of Western cultures and that the recognition of diversity within different cultures is extremely important in the contemporary world since we are constantly bombarded by oversimple generalisations about “Western civilisation ” “Asian values, ” “African cultures, ” and so on.
For more reading about Sen’s article, click on the following link .