Mrs. Roosevelt's Opus. - Review - book review

A World Made New
Mary Ann Glendon
Random House, $25.95, 384 pp.

The language of human rights is so ubiquitous in political discourse today, so readily invoked in even minor cases, that anyone born in the last half of the twentieth century might be excused for thinking it has long been so. It has not.

The path to our present emphasis on human rights has been long and often tortuous. It has been said that the passage from medieval to modern times has been marked by a shift of emphasis from duties to rights. But, as Mary Ann Glendon notes, the modern language of human rights stems from towering documents of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: the 1689 British Bill of Rights; the l776 U.S. Declaration of Independence; the 1789 French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen. To this distinguished lineage she would add the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the UN document whose progeny are the human rights movements, treaties, and constitutions around the world that are suffused with its principles.

A World Made New is the story of an important chapter in both the life of the United Nations and of Eleanor Roosevelt. The author asserts that when, on December 10, 1948, the General Assembly of the UN adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights without a dissenting vote, "the moral terrain of international relations was forever altered." A large claim! She also says that it is hard to imagine the declaration could have been brought to that state without the work of Mrs. Roosevelt. Although of a different order, that is another large claim.

From the first glimmerings of the idea of human rights in the UN Charter to its actual conception and final parturition in the declaration, it had to face indifference and hostility. Nor, it should be noted, has the increased stature of the declaration quelled the attacks or eliminated deep reservations. The document remains the stuff of debate and dissension. Mary Ann Glendon has undertaken to chart the passage of the declaration as Mrs. Roosevelt helped guide it through a UN maze that was mined with power politics, personal conflict, cultural differences, and long-held national animosities. To this daunting task Glendon brings an impressive array of talents. She has written prize-winning books on international law and cross-cultural issues, and she led the Vatican delegation to the Beijing Women's Rights Conference in 1985. She is a master of exposition and description, with a ready ear for a telling anecdote.

Her story begins in the mid-fifties when, after the devastating carnage of two world wars, many small countries and numerous humanitarian and religious groups called upon the great powers to fulfill their wartime rhetoric of equality and freedom. The great powers were focused on collective security; it was as a concession, a sop, that they consented to a peripheral project regarding human rights. It would not touch on matters of national sovereignty. Or so thought the leaders of the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain, France, and China.

Mrs. Roosevelt's rise to an ascendant position in the deliberations was fortuitous. President Harry Truman urged her to be a member of the U.S. delegation to the UN. Recently widowed and emotionally bereft, she had to overcome her own diffidence and the active opposition of both Republican and Democratic leaders. Her hard work and diligent preparation won over her critics, and she was asked to serve on the UN committee devoted to social, humanitarian, and cultural affairs. She guessed that she had been assigned where she could do the least harm, but she soon found that she was called upon to debate the formidable Andrei Vishinsky. Her winning performance dissipated any remaining doubts about her political acumen and her value to U.S. interests. When, subsequently, the Commission on Human Rights was instructed to prepare an international bill of human rights and the means to implement it, Mrs. Roosevelt served as chairman. According to Glendon, Roosevelt was one of four who were most crucial to the formulation of the declaration, the others being Ping-chun Chang, a Chinese philosopher and playwright; Charles Malik, a brilliant young Lebanese philosopher; and Rene Cassin, winner of the Nobel Prize and a legal pillar of the Free French.

The body of Glendon's book is the close reading of the arguments and events that led finally to the completed declaration. Some of the questions: How and by whom will the Bill of Rights be implemented? What is the relation between the individual and the state, and which is paramount? What is the distinction between state and society and what are the consequences of that distinction? What is the relation between political and civil rights and social and economic rights? Can the implementation of human rights infringe on national sovereignty?

The world's constitutions and treaties had been gathered and experts from different cultures and countries had been consulted. Their efforts were distilled into a list of rights followed by more than four hundred pages of commentary. Through a process of accommodation, discussion, compromise, confrontation, rancor, and collegiality, these were resolved into a declaration with a preamble and thirty articles. Glendon credits the many off-the-record social gatherings initiated by Mrs. Roosevelt for facilitating the process. And she makes a convincing case that, because the world outside the UN was becoming increasingly dangerous, if the declaration had not been completed and approved when it was, it would have been decades before it would even be attempted.

Although Glendon writes about the Universal Declaration and Mrs. Roosevelt's part in its passage with large sympathies, she is anything but utopian about its future. She acknowledges that there are large gaps and internal tensions in the document. More serious, though, are the problematic readings it has received. Soon after it was completed, the president of the American Bar Association said it would "promote state socialism, if not communism, around the world." Versions of that charge are still being made. Almost equally damaging in Glendon's eyes are those who rip single articles from the declaration to use as political clubs, destroying the organic unity so deliberately designed by the authors. She also faults those who read the document as if it were designed to express a single way of protecting human rights. Rather it was intended to provide a large general standard that could be incorporated in different cultures, under various conditions. Power and interests are constants in political life and are not destined to disappear, but if we follow the course Glendon directs us to, reason and conscience--to use her terms--may counter misguided power and interest and give the lie to the harsh dictates of realpolitik. Mary Ann Glendon has accomplished brilliantly her declared purpose.

James Finn was the United States representative at the UN's first international conference to consider freedom of religion and belief (Geneva, 1984). He was also a participant at the UN's conference on human rights held in Vienna in 1993.

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