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Criticism Fall 2011, Vol. 53, No. 4, pp. 607–624. ISSN 0011-1589. 607
© 2011 by Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201-1309
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level, one could argue that only memory of rights violations can nurture
the future of human rights in the world, thus providing a substantive
link between past and future. But, all too often, memory discourse and
contemporary rights debates remain separated by more than just disci-
plinary specialization with memory discourse dominant in the humani-
ties and rights discourse in the social sciences. From my vantage point in
the humanities, I would argue that contemporary memory studies should
be linked more robustly with human rights and justice discursively and
practically to prevent memory, especially traumatic memory, from be-
coming a vacuous exercise feeding parasitically and narrowly on itself.
But I would also suggest that unless it is nurtured by memory and history,
human rights discourse is in danger of losing historical grounding and
risks legalistic abstraction and political abuse. After all, the abstract uni-
versalism of human rights is both a problem and a promise.
were further markers for the renewal and spread of civil society debates
and rights implementations in many countries (especially in Eastern
Europe and Latin America). Clearly, rights struggles at this stage were
already international rather than still operating exclusively within tradi-
tional national frameworks.
The third wave differs dramatically. Since the end of the Cold War,
human rights violations have been selectively invoked as a justification
for the imposition of debilitating sanctions, military invasions, and au-
thoritarian occupation administrations by multilateral organizations
and/or states acting unilaterally under the rubric of humanitarian in-
tervention. Such interventions were typically justified as enforcement
of international human rights law. Bosnia, Afghanistan, and Iraq are
the pertinent, though politically very different, cases. Cohen thus dis-
tinguishes a traditional idea of human rights from a more current po-
litical notion of human rights interventions. At stake here is the conflict
between transnational human rights and a formerly sacrosanct idea of
national sovereignty. Indeed, the nation-state may no longer remain the
main and only guarantor of rights in a globalizing world at a time that has
seen many new UN conventions regarding rights and the creation of a
European Criminal Court and of the International Criminal Court. The
International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS)
has perhaps gone furthest in limiting state sovereignty in its 2001 report
“The Responsibility to Protect.” Although this report clearly came out of
the failures of the UN in the 1990s in Srebrenica (in Bosnia-Herzegovina)
and Rwanda, it is not clear to me whether the shift from humanitarian
intervention (“military humanism” as some have called it) to R2P (right
to protect) is actually more than a semantic shift, given that the potential
protectors will inevitably still be the major powers that also led humani-
tarian interventions (minor exception: the UN’s African Union troops in
Darfur). At any rate, for better or worse, at this stage human rights has
become genuinely international and is problematically tied to military in-
tervention in sovereign states.
In today’s situation, it seems to me, key dimensions of each of these
three waves are intermingled to different degrees, depending on differing
constellations on the ground. Taken together, genocide and ethnic cleans-
ing, civil society and rights, as well as humanitarian intervention, shape a
dense, messy cluster of political and legal issues that call for specific analy-
sis in each and every case. We should not let the abuse of humanitarian
intervention during the recent Bush years blind us to the potential of the
internationalization of the struggles for rights, least of all when it comes
to rights violations in the United States and Europe itself. Independent of
international human rights 611
Lies, has made the powerful argument that the disintegration of Yugosla-
via was characterized by the simultaneity of a terror of forgetting and a
terror of memory: forgetting the reality of multiethnic and multireligious
Yugoslavia; remembering and reviving mostly forgotten enmities of the
past. Strengths, limits, and abuses of memory need to be acknowledged in
their interplay case by case.
The same is true of human rights discourse that makes strong norma-
tive legal claims in the name of justice, but often ends up in an idolatry of
abstract principles, ignoring the historical and political contexts that must
be recognized and negotiated if a politics of human rights is to take hold
in a specific country at a given time. Legitimate differences of opinion
on what is human about human rights or which rights count as human
rights in the first place are often overridden by an inflation of rights dis-
course that risks devaluing the whole enterprise. Today, the ubiquity of
rights claims parallels the inflation of memory claims, and both rights
and memory discourse are easily abused as a political veil for particular
interests. Critics of human rights and of memory never cease to point this
out in order to discredit both.
Idolatry and abuse are especially visible internationally in the facile equa-
tion of universal human rights with Western democracy. They are im-
plicit in the notion that rights should spread from the United States to
other parts of the world. This argument draws on a discredited post–
World War II modernization theory resurrected in terms of human
rights. While the genealogy of today’s human rights debate goes back to
European sources of natural law of the seventeenth and eighteenth cen-
turies, Jürgen Habermas was right to suggest that international human
rights standards should be neither legitimized nor delegitimized by their
origins in European civilization and the Westphalian system of sovereign
nation-states.11 Opponents often cite this historical origin in order to dis-
credit rights discourse as Eurocentric and imperialist; proponents them-
selves remain largely ignorant of the fact that one cannot simply cite the
genealogy of rights in order to describe or justify current practices.
If we return to deep history at all, we must first acknowledge that
the relationship between human rights and Western democracy is com-
plex and fractured rather than in seamless harmony. Struggles for rights
have been waged over centuries in European states with widely varying
definitions and understandings of rights, and democracies have all too
614 andreas huyssen
often violated the rights of minorities. And they still do. In addition, the
propagation of human rights was always coupled with their denial in co-
lonial situations and slaveholding societies. This history made it possible
for some postcolonial states to denounce human rights as a Western impo-
sition and to deny rights to their own populations. The question of rights
has always been a question of power and asymmetrical relations, and the
same is true for what Michael Rothberg has called the zero-sum competi-
tion among memory discourses today.
While the colonial genealogy must be recognized, the idea and prac-
tice of human rights has undergone so many transformations that the
origins in divine natural law or even in the American and French Revo-
lutions have become largely irrelevant as a legitimizing device. Interna-
tional human rights today are rather legitimized by the need across the
world to respond to the challenges of a social and economic modernity
that, however locally fractured and transformed, has become global.12
This inevitably involves a certain level of abstraction in the judgment of
atrocities and human rights abuses. It is the abstraction of modernity itself
without which memories of atrocities would not attain their transnational
power of affect and mobilization beyond the communities of the victims
themselves.
And yet, a human rights regime entirely beyond states and nations is
not yet imaginable today, even if some political theorists have begun to
conceptualize a “global civil society” as opposed to or without a world
government (Weltbürgergesellschaft).13 Despite certain forms of denation-
alization of citizenship in some parts of the world (dual citizenship, Eu-
ropean Union [EU] passports, the granting of regional voting rights to
noncitizens, etc.), states do remain important legislators and guarantors of
expanded rights, especially via constitutions, new regulations of citizen-
ship and cultural rights, and commitments to transnational organizations.
Most of these rights struggles, which have no models in the past, still play
out within this context, even though there has been a growth of transna-
tional rights organizations such as the European Court of Human Rights
and the International Criminal Court. Despite such advances, new forms
of de facto statelessness have developed in the context of “illegal” migra-
tions, the sex trade, and other new forms of slavery and indentured labor.
This is particularly pertinent in the case of “third-country immigrants”
to the EU and of mainly Latin American and Chinese immigrants to the
United States. Hannah Arendt’s warning that
Rights and memory are linked and yet differentiated in yet another as-
pect. Just as the nation once was, and still provides, the framework for
rights, it also served as the privileged space for collective memory as de-
fined by sociologists and historians from Maurice Halbwachs to Pierre
Nora and beyond. But while human rights discourse since UDHR of 1948
aims at universality, discourses about collective memory have typically
been limited to national or regional situations. This tends to block insight
into the ways a new transnational politics of memory has spread across
the world since 1989 in conjunction with rights discourse and yet separate
from it.15 The idea of collective memory mostly relied on an anthropo-
logical notion of culture as homogeneous and closed or self-contained.16
Therefore, a memorian like Carol Gluck has argued for differentiating
between official, vernacular, and individual memory, and I have argued
elsewhere that we abandon or at least bracket the notion of collective
memory altogether.17 This seems especially called for at a time when col-
lective memory, mostly understood today as national memory, is inevita-
bly shot through by group memories at the subnational or regional level,
as well as by diasporic memory mixings encountered with the increasing
flows of migration that challenge notions of cultural homogeneity. In ad-
dition, the construction of memory via the mass media makes a sociologi-
cal view of group memories ever more illusory. However you define it,
collective memory as a guiding idea has become conceptually and socio-
logically problematic.
With the expansion of rights since World War II, notions of national
cultures as distinct, coherent units not subject to cross-border interna-
tional rights claims have slowly weakened. Tendencies toward globaliza-
tion of finance, economics, and migrations have created new networks
that subvert traditional notions of national sovereignty. Nations once
616 andreas huyssen
rights violations that can keep human rights discourse from slipping too
quickly into ahistorical abstraction. Human and cultural rights discourse
must be supported by concrete cases of rights violations read in the con-
text of systemic conditions and deep histories, and it can be supported
by works of art that train our imagination not only to recognize what
Susan Sontag called the pain of others, but to construct legal, political, and
moral remedies against the unchecked proliferation of such pain. Classi-
cal Greek tragedy first articulated this constitutive link between memory
and rights: Antigone is a play not only about obligations to the dead, but
about the rights of the living.
Andreas Huyssen is the Villard Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Columbia
University. His publications include Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of
Amnesia (Routledge, 1995), Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory
(Stanford University Press, 2003) and, most recently, La Hantise de l’oubli (Editions Kimé,
2011).
Notes
I thank the participants of Columbia’s seminar on Engendering Archives for a sharp critique
of an earlier version of this essay, and I am grateful to Daniel Levy for suggesting how to
strengthen the reciprocal relationship between law and memory in my analysis.
1. Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2010).
2. W. James Booth, “The Unforgotten: Memories of Justice,” American Political Science
Review 95, no. 4 (2001): 777–91.
3. James J. Savelsberg and Ryan D. King, “Law and Collective Memory,” Annual Review
of Law and Social Science 3 (2007): 189–211. See also Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider,
Memory and Human Rights, Essays on Human Rights series (University Park: Pennsylva-
nia State University Press, 2010).
4. Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory, Cultural
Memory in the Present series (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003).
5. Moyn, “On the Genealogy of Morals,” Nation 284, no. 15 (2007): 25–31.
6. Jean Cohen, “Rethinking Human Rights, Democracy, and Sovereignty in the Age of
Globalization,” Political Theory 36, no. 4 (2008): 578–606.
7. Ibid., 580.
8. I cannot treat the relationship between rights and sovereignty here. On the history of the
concept of sovereignty, see the superb account by Dieter Grimm, Souveränität: Herkunft
und Zukunft eines Schlüsselbegriffs (Berlin: Berlin University Press, 2009).
9. Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” in Selected Writings, Volume 4: 1938–
1940, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, trans. Edmund Jephcott et al. (Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 389–400, quotation on 389f.
10. Mahmood Mamdani, “Amnesty or Impunity? A Preliminary Critique of the Report of
the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa (TRC),” diacritics 32, nos. 3–4
(2002): 33–59. See also the powerful literary account by Antjie Krog, Country of My Skull:
Guilt, Sorrow, and the Limits of Forgiveness in the New South Africa (New York: Three
Rivers Press, 1999).
11. Jürgen Habermas, “Zur Legitimation durch Menschenrechte,” in Philosophische Texte, 5
vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2009), 4:298–312.
12. On the importance of economic justice, see Amartya Sen, The Idea of Justice (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2009).
13. See Jürgen Habermas, “Kants Idee des ewigen Friedens,” in Die Einbeziehung des An-
deren (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1999), 192–236.
14. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (Cleveland, OH: World, 1958), 299.
624 andreas huyssen
15. Exceptions to this trend are Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remember-
ing the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
2009); Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider, The Holocaust Memory in the Global Age, Poli-
tics, History, and Social Change series (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006); and
Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory, Cultural
Memory in the Present series (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003).
16. This usage does not quite agree with the definition of the term in Maurice Halbwachs’s
work. Halbwachs acknowledged different groups as carriers of different collective
memories, but his framework remained the French nation. One finds the same national
focus in Realms of memory: The Construction of the French Past, under the direction
of Pierre Nora; English-language edition edited, with a foreword, by Lawrence D.
Kritzman; trans. Arthur Goldhammer; 3 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press,
ca. 1996–98); and Etienne François and Hagen Schulze, eds., Deutsche Erinnerungsorte,
3 vols. (Munich: Beck, 2009).
17. See Carol Gluck, “Operations of Memory: ‘Comfort Women’ and the World,” in Rup-
tured Histories: War, Memories, and the Post–Cold War in Asia, ed. Sheila Miyoshi Jager
and Rana Mitter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 47–77; and Andreas
Huyssen, “Transnationale Verwertungen von Holoaust und Kolonialismus,” in VerW-
ertungen von Vergangenheit: Mosse-Lectures 2008, ed. Elisabeth Wagner and Burkhardt
Wolf (Berlin: Vorwerk 8, 2009), 30–51.
18. Jan Assmann distinguishes cultural memory from generational memory in “Collective
Memory and Cultural Identity,” New German Critique, no. 65 (1995): 125–34.
19. Beatriz Sarlo, Tiempo pasado: Cultura de la memoria y guri sujetivo—Una discusion, 2nd
ed. (Buenos Aires: Siglo Veintiuno, 2005).
20. Luis Buñuel, My Last Sigh: The Autobiography of Luis Buñuel, trans. Abigail Israel (New
York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983), 4–5.
21. I cannot address here the problem of cultural genocide, an ambiguous formulation in
the early debates about genocide in Lemkin’s work. See Anson Rabinbach, “Genozid:
Genese eines Konzepts,” in Begriffe aus dem Kalten Krieg: Totalitarismus, Antifas-
chismus, Genozid (Jena, Germany: Wallstein, 2009), 43–73; and Bartolomé Clavero,
Genocide or Ethnocide, 1933–2007: How to Make, Unmake, and Remake Law with Words
(Milan: Giuffrè, 2008).
22. Seyla Benhabib, The Claims of Culture: Equality and Diversity in the Global Era (Princ-
eton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002).
23. See Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory.
24. Huyssen, “Transnationale Verwertungen.”
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