Rights

Abstract

While the field of human rights has greatly expanded in recent years, comparatively little attention has been paid to the Communist understanding of such rights, especially in an international setting. Rights issues were hotly debated themes in Eastern Europe from the very beginning, reflecting shifting ideals regarding the relationship between the socialist citizen and society. From the 1950s through the 1980s human rights became a surprising point of convergence for Eastern European and African representatives at the UN and elsewhere to build new associations beyond superpower antagonism. Different versions of human rights provided these regions with a newly minted language of socialist solidarity and cross-cultural understanding. International organizations served as key forums for exchanging ideas and building new alliances in the international community around rights advocacy. This chapter shows how representatives of recently decolonized states in Africa and Asia formed new coalitions that often included smaller Eastern European countries, fighting for the right to self-determination and against racial and religious discrimination in the 1960s, and then for gender rights in the 1970s. It then explores how the universalized idea of human rights fractured in the 1970s, in part due to the fading international appeal of common social and economic rights. Just as some outside Europe turned to the idea of e.g. African or Islamic rights, so European socialists’ rights work was increasingly focused on collective security in the European sphere, as their commitment to collective justice and anti-racist work at international institutions went into steep decline.