The end of history seems a good moment to take stock. Fukuyama's conceit (I mean it in both senses) that the triumph of Western liberalism has stopped the clock of change - has put an end to history - is already waning. We may reflect that human rights themselves have played a sacrificial role in this process, for the demise of the regimes of Eastern Europe was accelerated by a megaphone rhetoric about human rights from states, including our own, with an embarrassing capacity for overlooking human rights abuses among their own allies and clients and even within their own frontiers. The message between the lines has been that human rights are a commodity like any other, capable of being traded for political or economic advantage, and the rhetoric little more than the conduct of politics by other means.

LRB 11 May 1995 | PDF Download