The Foreign Service Journal, June 2011

saloniki from 1965 to 1966: from huge protests during my first night in Athens to a mammoth crypto-communist demonstration in Thessaloniki’s center three months later. Disrupted bus service, uncollected garbage, undeliv- ered mail, successive strikes, a care- taker government that couldn’t govern — all were under way long before the colonels’ coup brought a surface calm to the country. Yet whatever the memoir’s short- comings, and despite its hefty price tag, I commend Keeley for sharing a wealth of previously unpublished details about a pivotal episode in Greek history. The book offers lessons for American diplo- mats that remain as valid today as when Keeley learned them on the job in Athens 45 years ago. Patricia H. Kushlis was an FSO with the U.S. Information Agency from 1970 to 1998. A longer version of this review appeared on Whirled View, the world politics, public diplomacy and national security blog she co-writes with former FSO Patricia Lee Sharpe (http://whirledview.typepad.com). More Relevant Than Ever The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History Samuel Moyn, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010, $27.95, hardcover, 336 pages. R EVIEWED BY E LIZABETH S PIRO C LARK In The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History , Columbia University Pro- fessor Samuel Moyn skillfully orches- trates a single theme: the idea of human rights has never been what it seems. For instance, the concept’s roots are not, as some suppose, found in the French Revolution and the Rights of Man. Rather, they are “re- cent and contingent.” Moreover, when the United Na- tions adopted the Universal Declara- tion of Human Rights in 1948, it did so not to express a new and powerful idea, but precisely because that con- struct was not taken seriously, espe- cially by international lawyers. Not until the 1970s, in fact, would the West come to define human rights as a “hope for the future” and a “utopia of international law.” Following World War II, Moyn ex- plains, Western powers were still colo- nialists, so the concept of human rights assumed the identity of a fight for freedom — which was defined as the self-determination of peoples, not individual human rights. In addition, human rights had always been identi- fied with the state (the rights of the citizen) including revolution against the ruling authorities. In the postcolonial world, however, responsibility for human rights was freed from the nation-state. So the time was ripe for President Jimmy Carter’s adoption of a human rights policy in what Moyn called “the crucial year” of 1977. But as with so much else in the his- tory of human rights, Moyn says, this breakthrough was not quite what it seemed. It both emerged from the movements of the 1960s and profited from their collapse. Yet it also owed much to small contingencies, such as newly inaugurated Pres. Carter’s need to explain meeting with Soviet dissi- dent Vladimir Bukovsky in the face of official Soviet protests. As this reviewer noted in a Janu- ary 1977 Worldview article (“A Para- digm Shift in U.S. Foreign Policy: From Self-Determination to Human Rights”), congressional action in 1974 amending U.S. foreign assistance leg- islation to deny assistance to “gross vi- olators of human rights” was an unintended stage setter for the Car- ter administration’s human rights pol- icy. In fact, the legislation probably owed more to farm state interests than idealism. That same year, historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. drove the nail into the coffin of human rights as self-deter- mination, when he wrote: “States may meet all the criteria of national self- determination and still be blots on the planet” (“Human Rights: How Far, How Fast?”, Wall Street Journal , March 4, 1977). The view of human rights as uni- versal and transcendent did not last long, however. In the U.S. it quickly became a weapon of partisan politics, as the Reagan administration put human rights behind “democracy support” as a tool to fight commu- nism. The new administration viewed Samuel Moyn skillfully orchestrates a single theme: the idea of human rights has never been what it seems. B O O K S 62 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / J U N E 2 0 1 1