Salvatore Senese
in Peuples/Popoli/Peoples/Pueblos, n. 8 (October 1986)
And yet the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Peoples could not be regarded as the fruit of a brilliant intellectual operation: behind each of its enunciations there are the painful experiences of intolerable harassment of the individual or even great historical tragedies, and there is, at the same time, the awareness of millions of human beings, the emergence of human dignity in areas of the world far wider than the small enclosure of the West where historically ‘human rights’ were born.
Certainly, the genesis of the Algiers Declaration was greatly influenced by that collective workshop of analysis and reflection that were the three sessions of the Russell II Tribunal on Latin America, organised and chaired by Lelio Basso between 1974 and 1976. In that workshop, the defence of human rights came to be purged of the connotations of abstract idealism that so often marked it, and it ascended to the terrain of the historical and material conditions that can make it possible and successful. In this way, it became increasingly evident that man – whose dignity it is a matter of protecting – is not a subject detached from a socio-historical context, stripped of any collective dimension, but is instead an individuality and subjectivity determined within a social fabric, made up of language, culture, history, production relations, etc., and that the repeated attacks on man’s life and life’s dignity are not a matter of the individual, but a matter of the individual, a matter of the individual, a matter of the individual, a matter of the individual, a matter of the individual, a matter of the individual, and that repeated and systematic attacks on human subjectivity are always an indication of an attack on the collective dimension in which the subject is inscribed, so that the defence of this constitutes the obligatory passage for any action in defence of human dignity.
But this refounding of the defence of the dignity of the person was also driven by the great transformations that – starting from the end of the Second World War – invested the world stage, making arrangements that explicitly or implicitly presuppose the inequality of men less and less sustainable. It is no coincidence that a strong demand for universality is already expressed in the United Nations Charter, with particular reference to the good of peace, and, just a few years later, in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This aspiration for the foundation of universal values and rules has been largely frustrated in the decades that followed, but it has not diminished; on the contrary! The growing dangers threatening peace and the crisis of the bipolar system of world government, within which the universalist aspirations should have been realised, have only highlighted the structural inadequacy of the material constitution of the international order with respect to the universal goals of peace and the protection of human dignity.
Faced with this inadequacy, Lelio Basso warned with lucid clairvoyance that man’s collective dimension itself – in which alone the historical-natural value of the person can take root – cannot be safeguarded except through the foundation of new rules and a new order in international relations.
It is true that the enterprise was affected by the international climate that marked the mid-1970s: the ongoing détente process, the victory in Vietnam, the acceleration and almost definitive conclusion of the decolonisation process. All factors of hope. And yet, the promoters of the Algiers Declaration did not hide their shadows: ‘We live in times of great hope, but also of deep disquiet’, so began the preamble to the Declaration.
Today, ten years later, is it possible to make an initial judgement on the enterprise started by Lelio Basso, and continued, after his death, by the institutions he created to support it? The state of the world looks much bleaker than it did ten years ago. At the same time, however, the awareness of the irremediable inadequacy of this order in the face of the dramatic problems that humanity faces has entered the consciousness of millions of women and men, even in the most developed areas of the planet; and this awareness is pressing, much more than yesterday, on the structures of power, institutions and governments. A clearer, more problematic awareness, less prone to the emotional shortcuts of ‘revolution’ but more resolute and extensive, questions the linear idea of progress, questions the relationship between people and state and the crisis of the formation of the nation-state, within which modern democracy was born.
It is beginning to become common sense what the clearest spirits have seen for some time now, namely that humanity has reached a threshold where certain crucial problems emerge that directly affect every person, whatever their nationality, their social location, the site they inhabit on the planet. These common problems (the risk of nuclear conflict, protection of the earth’s ecosystem, the relationship with natural resources, control of technology, etc.) demand a common response and thus underpin, in the concreteness of the human dimension, the need for a new universality in place of the abstract, unifying and hegemonic models that have been proposed up to now (Man, understood as an abstraction or extrapolation of a particular historical process that took place in the West; progress, understood as productivist industrialism, etc.). Such myths actually tended to impose the same model, the same conception of history, and ultimately a single culture on all peoples, denying the possibility of experiencing history and erasing differences, the great variety of historical and cultural situations, specificities. Hence their failure, in a world that has shrunk, certainly, but which at the same time knows the explosion of subjectivities, the claim to identity and autonomy.
Building a new universality out of differences is the difficult task facing men today. To this task, the Algiers Declaration can offer a contribution of method. This meagre document, in fact, sets out in a few dozen provisions the fundamental goods that should be ensured to every people and every community and whose effective guarantee should function as a moment of empirical verification of the validity of the solutions or projects gradually proposed or implemented. The paths to be taken are not mortgaged, but in relation to them there is a strong need for control, for adequacy, of which certain parameters are provided, deduced from the experience of crises or collective dramas and therefore legitimised by history. The research remains open, but is enriched with an essential indication, a beginning of articulation of the need for the new order to be built from the concreteness of the human condition and its needs.
In this difficult historical phase, this is no small thing.
Senese, Salvatore
in: Peuples/Popoli/Peoples/Pueblos, n. 8 (October 1986)