Alex de Waal is programme director at the Social Science Research Council and the author, with Julie Flint, of Darfur: A Short History of a Long War.
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Vol. 23 No. 16 · 23 August 2001
pages 15-18 | 4510 words
The Moral Solipsism of Global Ethics Inc
Alex de Waal
- Like Water on Stone: The Story of Amnesty International by Jonathan Power
Allen Lane, 332 pp, £12.99, May 2001, ISBN 0 7139 9319 7
- Future Positive: International Co-operation in the 21st Century by Michael Edwards
Earthscan, 292 pp, £12.99, September 2000, ISBN 1 85383 740 7
- East Meets West: Human Rights and Democracy in East Asia by Daniel Bell
Princeton, 369 pp, £12.50, May 2000, ISBN 0 691 00508 7
‘Uhuru has a new name’, an advertising billboard for mobile phones announces in Dar es Salaam. ‘Uhuru’ – Swahili for ‘freedom’ or ‘liberation’ – is a sacred word throughout most of sub-Saharan Africa. It is an ideal for which Africans sacrificed much in their collective struggle against colonialism and racism. But almost two years after the death of Tanzania’s former President, Julius Nyerere, in the city that once hosted the OAU Liberation Committee, advertising of this kind passes without comment. In a globalised world, ideals become commodities along with everything else. The manufacture and dissemination of global ethics is a neglected strand of globalisation. We are all familiar with the core values embodied in human rights, democracy, ‘civil society’ and ‘governance’ – an aseptic word that seems to mean government minus politics. We also know the core institutions: the organisations, foundations and institutes that teach the world how to implement democracy and human rights. But do we, or the people who staff them, understand what they are up to?
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Letters
Vol. 23 No. 18 · 20 September 2001
From Daniel Bell
The 23 August issue of the LRB has a review by Alex de Waal of the book by Daniel Bell, East Meets West: Human Rights and Democracy in East Asia.
There are two Daniel Bells writing on social and political matters, and they are sometimes confused with one another. One, myself, is an emeritus professor of social sciences at Harvard University. The other is a young Canadian political theorist who is now teaching at the City University of Hong Kong. It is the latter Daniel Bell who wrote the book under review.
We two are unrelated, though we know each other well. When the young Daniel Bell wrote a PhD thesis at Oxford, on Communitarianism, published to praising reviews, and a number of persons thought I had written that book, I told him to use the initial A. (for Albert) in his publications, for the credit that was justly his. But the LRB, for some reason, does not use middle initials for contributors or in reviewing authors, so confusion remains confounded. When the young Daniel Bell came to his first teaching job at Singapore, a number of years ago, his seniors thought it strange that Daniel Bell had been writing for fifty years (true). I told him that if he did not use his middle initial, Chinese sages would be confounded by the Daniel Bell who was writing for a hundred years.
Alex de Waal has praised the book of Daniel A. Bell, and I want the credit to go to him.
Daniel Bell
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Vol. 23 No. 19 · 4 October 2001
From Edgar Ernstbrunner
It is surprising to find Alex de Waal (LRB, 23 August) claiming that 'the human rights movement itself crossed a Rubicon when it endorsed the military-humanitarian interventions in Somalia, Haiti and the former Yugoslavia.' What 'human rights movement' does he refer to? Many organisations constituting this nebulous entity supported these interventions; many others opposed them. The very issue of whether such actions are permissible continues to divide 'the' human rights movement, now stranded on both sides of the Rubicon, and consequently easier to defeat.
Edgar Ernstbrunner
Stockport
