7 - Embracing and Contesting

Summary

According to historians, the 1948 vote on the Universal Declaration on Human Rights was a moment of triumph, an ethical milestone when states reached a consensus on political morality. With this vote the United Nations completed the first step toward a Bill of Human Rights with international agreement on the primary aspects of human rights. Forty-eight states representing Judeo-Christian, Islamic, and Buddhist traditions agreed on twenty-eight rights overcoming historical and philosophical differences.

However, the Declaration was not frozen in 1948 but served, as its authors hoped, as a living document. By focusing on the history of its initial drafting, the Declaration loses its historical, political, and cultural complexity. A narrative of the Declaration after the triumphant vote reveals multiple, conflicting interpretations of human rights that the document’s broad language masked. These conflicts reflected neither Cold War nor developed–underdeveloped dichotomies, but were far more fractured. Because of this multiplicity, many powers, including the Soviet Union, were able to compete for moral authority linked to the Declaration. Despite the dominate narrative, the Declaration and human rights diplomacy in general did not freeze during the Cold War but became a battlefield on which many competing ideologies fought.