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SoSe 21: Human Rights and American Foreign Relations in the Twentieth Century

Bastiaan Bouwman

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Are human rights an American ideal? Today, the concept of human rights is invoked everywhere: in (international) law, policy, political discourse, and culture, from questions of religious freedom and racial discrimination to foreign aid and geopolitics. This was not always so, however, and historians have over the past years tangled – sometimes acrimoniously – over when and why human rights became so influential. They agree, however, that it happened sometime between the 1940s and 1990s. This same period is of course marked by the American ‘rise to globalism’, its ascendancy from a great power to a superpower or even a global hegemon. But as this course will show, the relationship between human rights and American foreign relations was never straightforward, and indeed at many times fraught. Going beyond simply signaling tensions between stated ideals and political practice, the course highlights the malleability of human rights and their relationship to wider political, intellectual, and cultural currents. It uses the insights of recent scholarship on the global history of human rights to throw fresh light on the question posed above. And rather than focusing only on the role of the American state, as in more traditional treatments of the subject, it emphatically includes international and transnational actors (hence ‘foreign relations’, not ‘foreign policy’). While paying attention to pre-1940s antecedents, as well as the past few decades, at the heart of the course are subjects such as the role played by emblematic leaders like Eleanor Roosevelt and Jimmy Carter, the relationship between human rights, civil rights, and anti-imperialism, and the international networks that sprang up to advocate for human rights in Latin America, Eastern Europe, and elsewhere. Students will learn to evaluate competing interpretations and explanations of the historical development of human rights. By analyzing not only secondary literature but also primary source materials, they will also strengthen their ability to contextualize and critically assess historical evidence. Finally, the course will equip them to articulate a historically-informed viewpoint in relation to present-day human rights discourse, in the United States and beyond. close