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The Ambivalence of Good: Human
Rights in International Politics since the

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OX F O R D S T U D I E S I N M O D E R N
E U RO P E A N H I S TO RY
General Editors
s imon di xon ma rk m a zowe r
and
ja mes reta l l ac k
The Ambivalence
of Good
Human Rights in International Politics
since the 1940s
JAN ECKEL
Translated by
R A C H E L WA R D
1
1
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Contents
Abbreviations vii
Introduction: The Ambivalence of Good 1

1. Prologue: The ‘Pre-History’ of Human Rights as a
Historiographical Problem 15
PA RT O N E : T H E 1 9 4 0s TO T H E 1 9 6 0 s
2. Human Rights Policy in the United Nations 51
3. Human Rights in the Council of Europe and in the Organization
of American States 75
4. NGOs and Human Rights 96
5. Human Rights and Decolonization 117
PA RT T WO : T H E 1 9 70 s A N D 1 9 8 0 s
6. Amnesty International and the Reinvention of Western Human
Rights Activism159
7. Human Rights in Western Foreign Policy 190
8. The Pinochet Dictatorship in International Politics 243
9. Human Rights, Communism, and Dissidence in Eastern Europe 292
10. Human Rights in the Postcolonial World 320
Conclusion340
Bibliography 357
Index 439
Abbreviations
Apart from some periodical titles, all abbreviations in the text are explained at first occurrence.
The following list includes only some frequently employed abbreviations.
AfS Archiv für Sozialgeschichte

AHR American Historical Review
AI NL Amnesty International Nederland
AIUSA Amnesty International USA
AMRE Archivo del Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores
BCN Biblioteca del Congreso Nacional
CDP Chile Declassification Project
CHR Commission on Human Rights
CHRD Chile Human Rights Documents
CSOP Commission to Study the Organization of Peace
CU Columbia University
ECOSOC Economic and Social Council
FAZ Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
GA General Assembly
GG Geschichte und Gesellschaft
HRQ Human Rights Quarterly
HZ Historische Zeitschrift
IAO Internationale Arbeitsorganisation
ICJ International Commission of Jurists
ICM International Council Meeting
IEC International Executive Committee
IISG Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis
IS International Secretariat
ILRM International League for the Rights of Man
JCPL Jimmy Carter Presidential Library
JoCH Journal of Contemporary History
KSZE Konferenz über Sicherheit und Zusammenarbeit in Europa
MRREE Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores
NADH Nationaal Archief, Den Haag
NAK National Archives, Kew
NARA National Archives and Records Administration
NYPL New York Public Library
OAE Organisation der Afrikanischen Einheit
OAS Organisation der Amerikanischen Staaten
PP Public Papers of the President
RG Record Group
RU Rutgers University
UNCIO Documents of the United Nations Conference on International
Organization
UNOGA United Nations Office at Geneva, Archives
WILPF Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom
ZfG Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft
Introduction
The Ambivalence of Good
The twentieth century brought state violence and mass killing to a staggering
culmination. Two highly industrialized world wars fought with utter destructive
will brought a level of devastation beyond anything that could have been imagined
to that point. Although Europe was spared military conflict in the decades that
followed, other world regions were repeatedly laid waste by wars and civil wars—
this affected Indochina and Korea as well as the Middle East, Nigeria, Angola, the
Horn of Africa, and Central America. Mass murder of defenceless civilians, often
committed in the course of war, came almost to symbolize the century. The murder
of the European Jews, the genocides in Armenia, Cambodia, and Rwanda, the
massacres in Indonesia, Bangladesh, and the disintegrating Yugoslavia showed
quite plainly the extreme destructive fury that could be unleashed by hatred for
mostly imagined enemies. At the same time, dictatorial repression took on a new
quality. Although the totalitarian projects of the National Socialists, Fascists,
and Soviet Communists had either failed or passed their zenith by the middle
of the century, political events were shaped by authoritarian regimes in many
countries around the world. Countless people were subjected to persecution on
grounds of their religion, their ethnicity, or their sex. Unsurprisingly, these vio-
lent characteristics still determine historical representation of the century to
this day. Almost all interpretations of the period have seen this upheaval as a
pivotal element.
However, the twentieth century was also the era which saw an astonishing rise
in the notion of human rights. Beginning with the groundbreaking Universal
Declaration in 1948, human rights found their way into international agreements,
which enshrined them as universal, inviolable standards. Over the following
decades, an ever-denser network of national and international institutions developed,
consisting of NGOs, human rights commissions, and foreign office departments
that monitored states’ compliance with these standards, and raised awareness of
breaches. Crucially, numerous politicians, activists, diplomats, and international
officials went to considerable effort to make the promise of human rights a reality.
They did their utmost to confront government crimes, to help suffering ‘others’,
and to make wars less likely. In doing so, they were guided by the hope of creating
a better, safer world—a hope that was seldom naive, and generally combined with
a sharp eye for political realities.
2 The Ambivalence of Good
To fully understand the twentieth century, we must consider these twin facets.
Both the eruptions of violence and the development of international human rights
policy are emblematic of its history. The way in which we elucidate this history, the
driving force behind it, its essence and legacies, largely depends on how we relate
these two strands to each other. Their correlation is, however, more complicated
than it might seem at first glance. The history of human rights may arise from
noble motives and a determination to help, yet it cannot simply be seen as the
ethically pure and politically liberating flip side of a century of destruction.
International human rights standards do not represent the moral lesson drawn
unanimously by the international community after 1945 from the wars and
genocides that had gone before. Even in later years, human rights initiatives were
never an automatic answer to state crimes. Many factors determined whether or
not concerted relief efforts would be forthcoming: was there enough information
available to arouse attention and demonstrate state repression in such a way that
intervention seemed both necessary and useful, and that political support could be
mobilized and political resistance overcome? There was no shortage of instances
where powerful forces, able to stem oppression and murder, were entirely absent,
to which the genocides in Cambodia and Rwanda bear a particularly depressing
witness. And even when politicians and activists appealed to human rights to
protect others, in the Soviet Union or South Africa, Algeria or Argentina, this was
seldom motivated by entirely altruistic ideas. Strategic calculations, political
compulsion to act, or self-serving expectations of a political or moral reward would
also play their part. International human rights policy does not embody any kind
of alternative world order, any kind of inverted mirror image of the Realpolitik
that traditionally dominates international affairs. Human rights were woven into
the course of the century—into its conflicts and crises, its history of crime and
repression, its desire for a better world and outbursts of reform—in many more
diverse and ambiguous ways.
My study takes this tension as an intellectual starting point from which to
explore how, and to what extent, the discourse and practice of human rights
affected international politics in the twentieth century, and its second half in
particular. An exhaustive analysis of the history of human rights in the period goes
beyond its scope, yet I will consider a range of topic areas that offer important and
meaningful insights into that history. The first chapter investigates the background
history, that is, the strands in the development of international human rights
policy that reach back into the period before 1945. Here, I focus on the experience
of the interwar period and on various initiatives that emerged in the early forties—
the visions of a post-war order pursued by internationalist groups in the USA,
federalists and resistance activists in Europe, and the Catholic Church, as well as
the negotiations that led to the establishment of the United Nations. The sec-
ond chapter deals with the United Nations’ human rights work following the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights, taking as examples the discussions around
forced labour, freedom of information, and an ‘action programme’ suggested by
the USA. The third chapter highlights the historical gap between Western Europe,
where a strong formal system of international human rights arose, and Latin America,
Introduction 3
where that was not the case. Non-governmental organizations were a decisive force
in breathing political life into the discourse around human rights in those years, as
is shown in chapter four. The case of the International League for the Rights of
Man demonstrates, however, that they never had a great deal of room for m anoeuvre
in the post-war period. Chapter five turns to the history of decolonization and
investigates the role of human rights in anti-colonial discourse, human rights
initiatives launched by postcolonial states in the United Nations, and the impact
of human rights criticism on the decisions of colonial powers to withdraw from
the colonies.
The second part of the book is devoted to new beginnings in human rights
policy in the 1970s and traces their development until the end of the following
decade. Chapter six investigates the way in which the institutional structure and
political activism of the most important non-governmental organization of that
era, Amnesty International, took shape and changed, as well as the motivations
and political lifestyles that shaped its US members’ involvement. The seventh
chapter takes a detailed look at the extent to which Western governments’ (those
of the Netherlands, the USA, and Great Britain) turning towards human rights
protection was a decisive factor in human rights gaining such an increased status
in international politics. It also describes the way in which the conservative govern-
ments that came to power in the USA and the Federal Republic of Germany in the
early 1980s attempted to turn back the clock on human rights, before ultimately
focusing on a conservative redefinition of the idea.
The new clout of international NGOs and increased sensitivity to human rights
in Western governments were important reasons for the Chilean military dictator-
ship under Augusto Pinochet’s becoming the target of unprecedented international
protest. Chapter eight analyses the dynamics behind the emergence of these
campaigns, the regime’s reactions, and the significance of human rights pressures
in the junta’s decision to abandon power. Chapter nine turns our attention to
Eastern Europe. It shows the way in which dissident movements in the seventies
made human rights a cipher for ideological, political, and tactical reorientation,
even though this process unfolded very differently in different countries. At the
same time, it demonstrates the way in which the Conference on Security and
Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) changed the preconditions for diplomatic
exchanges between East and West, and investigates the role played by human rights
in the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe. Finally, chapter ten traces the
hugely altered significance of human rights for African and Asian states following
independence. On one hand, postcolonial governments found themselves facing
a new kind of criticism, while on the other, a regional human rights system
developed, and intellectuals were able to construct a genuinely African tradition of
human rights.
In every chapter, I consider the development of human rights policy in three
dimensions. The first is concerned with the question of genesis. I look into the
historical experiences, political motivations, and perceptions on the basis of which
politicians or activists took up the idea of human rights and got developments off
the ground in this area. This also includes the ways in which they fleshed the idea
out in any given case, and the political aims with which they implemented it.
Moreover, my analysis focuses heavily on the practice of human rights policy. It
was this practice which largely determined the power, and at times even the very
substance, of human rights.
I therefore look closely at the development of proceedings within intergovern-
mental organizations, how NGOs operated, how human rights percolated into
foreign policy decision-making, the dynamics which sparked public mobilization,
and the unfolding of human rights conflicts.
Finally, I attempt to tease out and evaluate the effects of initiatives undertaken
in the name of human rights. Interestingly, most historians of human rights have
thus far steered clear of such questions of impact. Yet they are precisely the ones
that historians should be asking in any attempt to measure the power that human
rights have had to transform international politics. In order to relate these three
perspectives to each other, I consider international human rights policy as a field
consisting of a multitude of organizations and institutions, an abundance of state
and non-state players all in communication with each other, and of certain
forums—particularly the United Nations—in which discussions and conflicts
could be brought together. The emergence and transformation of this political field
provide the conceptual framework for my study.
The book draws heavily on, and attempts to synthesize, historical literature and
published sources. It is, however, predominantly based on my research in numerous
archives throughout five countries. These, with the exception of Chile, are Western
nations, yet this statement demonstrates in itself the imprecision of this classifica-
tion. In different periods and policy areas, Chile has been classed variously as
part of the Western camp, or as a ‘developing country’ in the Global South, and
even as both at once. I did not carry out any archive research in Eastern Europe,
Africa, or Asia for practical reasons. Developments in these regions are very sig-
nificant for the global history of human rights and thus central to my investigation.
Yet it is inevitable, on balance, that my findings in this area have less depth of
focus. Nonetheless, this study takes a twofold approach. It aims to unfold an
overarching interpretation of international human rights policy in the latter half of
the twentieth century. At the same time, it also seeks to generate empirical
knowledge of important aspects and expressions of this policy, and thus to break
new h istorical ground.
The literature on human rights has not, to date, produced a research-based,
synthetic study of this kind. That said, our knowledge of the history of human
rights in this period has made impressive progress in recent years.1 The first wave
1 Cf. as the worldwide first research-based overview of international human rights policy since
1945: Eckel, ‘Utopie der Moral, Kalkül der Macht. Menschenrechte in der globalen Politik nach
1945’. The earliest inspiration for empirically based research into human rights policy in the latter half
of the century was provided by the late Kenneth Cmiel. Cf., for example, Cmiel, ‘The Recent
Historiography of Human Rights’. In American Historical Review 109 (2004), pp. 117–35. Lynn
Hunt’s book, Inventing Human Rights. A History (New York and London, 2017), was also influential.
For more recent research essays see also Devin O. Pendas, ‘Toward a New Politics? On the Recent
Historiography of Human Rights’. In Contemporary European History 21 (2012), pp. 95–111; Samuel
Moyn, ‘Substance, Scale, and Salience. The Recent Historiography of Human Rights’. In Annual
Introduction 5
of historical scholarship, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, tended to be sweeping
in scope but often presented only a roughly elaborated overview; this has given way
to a second phase of more narrowly focused investigations with a sound empirical
basis.2 Human rights history remains a fast-moving field. A series of enlightening
studies have appeared even since this book was first published in its original
German version, in 2014.3
Historians have differed markedly on the overall significance of human rights in
twentieth-century history. There are three predominant narratives that appear in
the literature. The first authors to write on the history of human rights mostly
understood that history as a uniform and continuous development, spanning
decades or even centuries.4 Some framed the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights as the beginning of a ‘human rights revolution’, which subsequently prolif-
erated ever more strongly. The search for continuities in the history of human
rights is undoubtedly important, and it makes sense to ask whether there might in
fact always have been some kind of idea of human rights, which might have gone
by other names yet remained unchanged in its essential nature. In this strand of
studies, however, changes over time, differences in practice and rationale, and
cultural variations have fared badly. Moreover, the authors have tended to take an
unquestioningly positive view of human rights. As a result, they have evened out
the contradictory claims formulated in the name of human rights, and often
disregarded ruptures in political implementation. In fact, this first narrative
itself now appears in a historical light. It dates back to the late nineties, when
human rights policy was flourishing around the world. Some authors were evi-
dently working at ‘inventing traditions’ in an attempt to provide a longstanding
backstory for the boom they were then experiencing, which they understood in
optimistic terms.
Review of Law and Social Science 8 (2012), pp. 123–40; Philip Alston, ‘Does the Past Matter? On the
Origins of Human Rights’. In Harvard Law Review 126 (2013), pp. 2043–81.
2 For an early longitudinal view see especially Lauren, The Evolution of International Human Rights;
Ishay, The History of Human Rights. From Ancient Times to the Globalization Era. Various anthologies
give a good overview of the new wave of research. Cf. Paul Hoffmann (ed.), Human Rights in the
Twentieth Century (Cambridge, UK, 2010); Akira Iriye, Petra Goedde, and William Hitchcock (eds),
Human Rights Revolution. An International History (New York, 2012); Jan Eckel and Samuel Moyn (eds),
The Breakthrough. Human Rights in the 1970s (Philadelphia, PA, 2013); Norbert Frei and Anette Weinke,
Toward a New Moral World Order? Menschenrechtspolitik und Völkerrecht seit 1945 (Göttingen, 2013).
3 For monographical studies see e.g. Barbara J. Keys, Reclaiming American Virtue. The Human
Rights Revolution of the 1970s (Cambridge, MA, 2014); Christopher N. J. Roberts, The Contentious
History of the International Bill of Human Rights (Cambridge, UK, 2015); Daniel J. Sargent,
A Superpower Transformed. The Remaking of American Foreign Relations in the 1970s (Oxford and
New York, 2015); Steven Jensen, The Making of International Human Rights. The 1960s, Decolonization,
and the Reconstruction of Global Values (Cambridge, UK, 2016); Mark Philipp Bradley, The World
Reimagined. Americans and Human Rights in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, UK, 2016);
Nathaniel A. Kurz, A Sphere above the Nations? The Rise and Fall of International Jewish Human Rights
Politics, Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University (2015); Patrick William Kelly, Sovereign Emergencies. Latin
America and the Making of Global Human Rights Politics, Ph.D. dissertation, University of Chicago (2016).
4 Cf. Paul Gordon Lauren, The Evolution of International Human Rights (Philadelphia, PA, 2003);
Micheline R. Ishay, The History of Human Rights. From Ancient Times to the Globalization Era (Berkeley,
CA, 2004); William Korey, NGOs and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. ‘A Curious Grapevine’
(New York, 1998); Paul Kennedy, Parlament der Menschheit. Die Vereinten Nationen und der Weg zur
Weltregierung (Munich, 2007).
Another, less-developed strand of interpretation emphasizes the inconsistencies

and the moral hypocrisy that cast doubt on the human rights policy of Western
figures. These historians focus particularly, but not exclusively, on the American
government.5 They display a highly critical attitude that seems legitimate in
political terms but sometimes comes at the expense of historical distance. Indeed,
many of the arguments formulated by proponents of this view can be found in
discussions from the time. Perhaps more importantly, their perspective falls short
in certain regards. The fact that politicians and activists have made use of the idea
of human rights to create a noble self-image and to disguise ambitions for power,
and that in so doing they often failed to improve living conditions in other coun-
tries, has had a profound impact on human rights policy. Yet it characterized both
Western policy and that of other states and organizations. And it was rare for that
to be their sole concern. Their motivations and uses were almost always multilayered
and fraught with tension, and those involved at the time reflected more deeply on
their actions than historical critics sometimes give them credit for.
A third narrative consists of stories of origins. They highlight a particular
historical moment—generally associated with a certain group of key players or
particular sets of events—during which they claim that the ideological, political, or
emotional essence of human rights emerged. Historians have identified such
origins even before the twentieth century—for example in the French Revolution,
abolitionism, or nineteenth-century humanitarian interventions.6 For other
authors, by contrast, the decisive step seemed to have been taken in the years
following the Second World War. In their view, it was at that time that visionary
international law pioneers and their work towards international standards of
human rights, especially in the form of the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights, laid the foundations upon which the entire human rights policy of sub-
sequent decades would unfold.7 Moreover, various events in the decolonization
years were interpreted as decisive foundation histories, latterly, for example, in the
discussion advanced by states of the Global South around the condemnation of
5 Cf. Kirsten Sellars, The Rise and Rise of Human Rights (Stroud, 2002); and the work of Barbara
Keys and Bradley Simpson.
6 Cf. Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights. A History (New York and London, 2007);
Jenny S. Martínez, The Slave Trade and the Origins of International Human Rights Law (Oxford, 2012);
Gary J. Bass, Freedom’s Battle. The Origins of Humanitarian Intervention (New York, 2008); Adam
Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost. A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa (Boston, MA,
and New York, 1998).
7 Cf. Johannes Morsink, The Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Origins, Drafting and Intent
(Philadelphia, PA, 1999); Ann Mary Glendon, A World Made New. Eleanor Roosevelt and the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights (New York, 2001); Bradley A. W. Simpson, Human Rights
and the End of Empire. Britain and the Genesis of the European Convention (Oxford, 2001); Mark
Mazower, ‘The Strange Triumph of Human Rights 1933–1950’. In The Historical Journal 47 (2004),
pp. 379–99; Elizabeth Borgwardt, A New Deal for the World. America’s Vision for Human Rights
(Cambridge, MA, and London, 2005); Jay M. Winter, Dreams of Peace and Freedom. Utopian
Moments in the Twentieth Century (New Haven, CT, 2006); idem and Antoine Prost, René Cassin
and Human Rights. From the Great War to the Universal Declaration (Cambridge, UK, 2013); Roger
Normand and Sarah Zaidi, Human Rights at the UN. The Political History of Universal Justice
(Bloomington, IN, and Indianapolis, 2008).
Introduction 7
racial discrimination and the commitment to religious tolerance.8 Furthermore,

there has already been discussion of the 1990s as the period when the ‘real’ idea
and practice of human rights originated; this can be seen in a sense as closing the
circle, given that this was also the decade in which more recent human rights schol-
arship itself originated.9 The most influential interpretation of this kind, meanwhile,
was put forward by Samuel Moyn, in whose view the 1970s were the period when
the modern idea of human rights arose so astonishingly.10 It was during these
years, Moyn argues, that human rights replaced older, utopian political projects,
which collapsed in the political turmoil of that decade, translating them into a
new, substantially more muted expression of idealism—into the ‘last utopia’
that remained.
This scholarly reflection on the genesis of human rights has absorbed by far the
most part of intellectual energy to date, unleashing considerable controversy in the
process. Given that this is a young field of research, the concentration on matters
of periodization is understandable; these have indeed endowed the debate with a
relatively high degree of coherence. All the same, the endeavour to discover the
one historical ‘breakthrough’ has sometimes been conducted with such dogged
determination that it begins to resemble a quest for the Holy Grail—possibly
successful in legend, yet undoubtedly unsatisfactory as a model for historical
scholarship.11 It can hardly be helpful in achieving a nuanced historical under-
standing to declare single episodes and isolated snippets the key to explaining the
entire history of human rights, playing off various decades and actors against one
another. Research of this kind, much of it removed from archival evidence, is
more likely to produce an inflation of origins, decisive turning points, formative
moments, groundbreaking new developments, and ultimately also teleological
points of culmination.
This book, therefore, adopts a more comprehensive perspective in terms of
both time and space, with the aim of examining an array of historical develop-
ments and relating them to one another. Viewed from such an angle, a policy
field—albeit limited in character—began to emerge in the 1940s. I therefore
8 Such as Jensen’s study Making. See also Roland Burke, Decolonization and the Evolution of
International Human Rights (Philadelphia, PA, 2010); Meredith Terretta, ‘ “We Had Been Fooled into
Thinking that the UN Watches over the Entire World”. Human Rights, UN Trust Territories, and
Africa’s Decolonization’. In HRQ 34 (2012), pp. 329–60.
9 Cf. Hoffmann, ‘Rights’ and for discussion Samuel Moyn, ‘The End of Human Rights History’.
In Past and Present 233 (2016), pp. 307–22; Lynn Hunt, ‘The Long and the Short of the History of
Human Rights’. In Past and Present 233 (2016), pp. 323–31.
10 Cf. Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia. Human Rights in History (Cambridge, MA, and London,
2010); idem, Human Rights and the Uses of History (London, 2014). See also Eckel and Moyn (eds),
Breakthrough; Keys, Virtue. The first to highlight the importance of the 1970s (with a view to American
history) was Kenneth Cmiel, ‘The Emergence of Human Rights Politics in the United States’. In
Journal of American History 86 (1999), pp. 1231–50.
11 Cf. Mark Philipp Bradley, ‘American Vernaculars. The United States and the Global Human
Rights Imagination’. In Diplomatic History 38 (2014), pp. 1–24, who feels reminded of ‘take-no-prisoners
competitive sweepstakes’ (p. 4), as well as Robert Brier, ‘Beyond the Quest for a “Breakthrough”.
Reflections on the Recent Historiography on Human Rights’. In Jahrbuch für europäische Geschichte
16 (2015), pp. 155–74.
consider the seventies not as the beginning of human rights policy, but as a time of
transformation—although one that marked a crucial turning point, producing
substantial shifts.12 I share the opinion that political disillusionment was an
important reason for the widespread attractiveness of the idea of human rights in
that decade. But I see it as only one reason among many, and do not believe that
every important development of the decade can be traced back to it. In all this,
the question of origins can deliver only partial explanations, especially when
conceived, as by Samuel Moyn, purely in terms of the history of ideas. This is
another reason why I consider it necessary to expand the focus to include the
forms and effects of human rights policy.
Considering that human rights policy since the forties has developed during a
phase of rapid historical change, and has involved a multitude of players acting
within an incredibly diverse range of parameters, it seems impossible from the
outset to fit this development into a linear, one-dimensional, or even morally
unequivocal narrative. We can clearly not tell a story of unbroken progress. Likewise,
these processes cannot be entirely subsumed either into a politico-historical
criticism of Western hypocrisy or into the stalled attempts at emancipation from
the Global South, or even into the loss of utopia in the 1970s. By the same token,
the unexpected successes emanating from the soft power of moral politics represent
only one facet of the history, as do those instances when rebellions or interventions
in the name of universal principles proved futile. Looking at it from the other
extreme, however, it would be equally unhelpful to consider events as entirely
disparate and to fragment them into unconnected historical episodes. Human
rights as a policy area was too internally coherent to do so, and the connections
that the global discourse on human rights created between different actors and
world regions were too close.
This book attempts to steer a course between these extremes by developing three
fundamental lines of interpretation. First, as already suggested, I narrate the
history of human rights as a fractured and discontinuous process. This does not
imply that I discard all traditions and interpret every new approach to the idea as
a radical innovation. I do, however, aim to demonstrate the very different ways in
which the notion of human rights and its political implementation could be
shaped over the course of time. Likewise, I stress throughout that short-term
causes, and occasionally also immediate triggers, had a more significant impact on
the implementation of human rights policy than distant historical roots or long-term
continuities that may also have existed.
Viewed from this angle, the twentieth century presents several moments when
human rights received injections of vital energy. This applied initially to the years
around the end of the Second World War. In this phase, the strongest catalyst lay
12 For my interpretation of the 1970s see Jan Eckel, ‘Utopie der Moral, Kalkül der Macht.
Menschenrechte in der globalen Politik nach 1945’. In Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 49 (2009),
pp. 437–84, here pp. 458–82; idem, ‘Humanitarisierung der internationalen Beziehungen?
Menschenrechtspolitik in den 1970er Jahren’. In Geschichte und Gesellschaft 38 (2012), pp. 603–35;
idem, ‘The Rebirth of Politics from the Spirit of Morality: Explaining the Human Rights Revolution
of the 1970s’. In Breakthrough, edited by idem and Moyn (Philadelphia, PA, 2013), pp. 226–60.
Introduction 9
in the fact that protecting human rights appeared to offer a guarantee of effective
international security structures. The danger posed to international coexistence by
fascist and militaristic regimes’ resolute will to war should in future be nipped in
the bud by preventing any determined political leadership from ever being able to
exert total dominance over its own population. The most important result of this
line of thought was that human rights took root in international politics, and more
precisely in intergovernmental organizations. The transformative effect of these
new beginnings in international politics remained limited, however. Work in the
United Nations stagnated and the Council of Europe’s human rights system went
unused. Numerous non-governmental organizations turned away from the new
bodies in frustration. The history of human rights policy in the forties and fifties
was, to a great extent, the history of a creeping disenchantment, of waiting for a
transformation in international politics that was not forthcoming.
Decolonization gave international human rights policy a more limited boost,
yet also had more mixed results. On one hand, many political elites in the colonies
also rejected the declarations of human rights and procedural opportunities offered
by the United Nations, sometimes out of disillusionment, and sometimes out of
fundamental scepticism. On the other hand, the coalition of African and Asian
states did largely manage to link the United Nations’ human rights work to the
fight against colonial rule, apartheid, and racial discrimination. In this way, they
established a symbolic order in the global organization that turned prevailing
power relationships in international politics upside down. This represented a
significant triumph for independence movements and postcolonial governments,
even if human rights outside the United Nations were of fluctuating and often
somewhat incidental importance in the pursuit of national independence.
In the seventies and eighties, human rights attained greater prominence than
ever before in international politics. This flowed from a multifaceted shift whose
greatest common factor lay in the fact that human rights developed into a multi-
functional promise of moral renewal. They would revitalize politics in a variety
of situations, both ideologically, as a general principle and an aspiration, and
strategically, in concrete political practice. This vision was centred on a sober,
minimalist project for making the world a better place, a rejection of the Manichean
thinking of the Cold War, the moralization of political action, and the idea of what
might be called an apolitical politics, that would transcend all rival camps and
social dividing lines.
In this phase, as in the forties and fifties, a number of particularly outspoken
attempts at reform went awry. The Eastern European dissident movement was
soon crushed in most countries. British and Dutch human rights policy achieved
no particular breakthroughs, and observers inside and outside the United States
agreed almost unanimously that Jimmy Carter’s policy had failed, and had done so
in style. Over the years, the Chilean dictatorship and the South African apartheid
regime proved resistant to external criticism. Even so, human rights initiatives now
began to fundamentally, yet often subtly, transform international relations. There
was a sudden and irreversible rise in sensitivity to human rights issues in the public
realm. From now on, human rights would form an issue in its own right in state
relations, put down firm institutional roots, and become almost axiomatic in
international politics. This also improved the prospects of government crimes
being internationally shunned and politically combated. The late eighties were
particularly decisive in this process, and this book emphasizes their significance.
Amnesty International acquired greater influence than ever before. Moreover, in
Western states, commitment to human rights had—for the first time—become a
matter of cross-party political consensus and was no longer contested in principle.
Finally, criticism on human rights grounds played an important supporting role in
the process of democratizing dictatorships towards the end of the decade. This held
true, in varying ways and to varying extents, in Chile, South Africa, and the Soviet
Union alike.
Secondly, this book depicts a polycentric development in international human
rights policy with contributions from a range of players in various places, whether
they sought to help others or to protect themselves.13 They thereby attached a wide
range of sometimes contradictory meanings to the term over the decades. During
the Second World War, Jewish organizations approached the notion of human
rights out of their experience of religious and racist persecution, while American
internationalists considered it from the perspective of aggression by radical dicta-
torships that had plunged the world into war. Federalists in Europe, and Catholic
clergy, aimed to protect the dignity of the human person within the framework of
the nation state. Soon after the Second World War, dozens of states began to shape
notions of human rights within the United Nations, doing so from diverse national
legal traditions and foreign policy interests. At around the same time, the members
of the Council of Europe made human rights an essential part of the consensus of
values to which they aspired. These were strongly anti-communist and had a mark-
edly conservative tone. Subsequently, nationalist leaders in the colonies, and repre-
sentatives of postcolonial governments, also began to make use of human rights
principles, extending them to denounce the colonial powers. In so doing, they asso-
ciated them with the fight against racial discrimination and colonial repression.
This array of understandings continued over the following decades. In the
1970s, activists in Latin America and Eastern Europe made human rights a highly
charged symbolic language with which to signify internal opposition to dictator-
ships. They were far less concerned with the political philosophy of human rights
than with forging an, often literally, existential strategy of self-defence. In Western
countries meanwhile, a new protest movement elevated human rights to symbolize
a global commitment to suffering individuals. By the same token, they used them
to criticize what they saw as Western governments’ lack of moral sensitivity in
foreign policy. Similar motivations also inspired some governments to make human
rights protection an important foreign policy aim. United States president Jimmy
Carter pursued this as a means of overcoming a foreign policy that had led to war
and moral bankruptcy. The Dutch government, by contrast, used human rights for
a new-leftist reshaping of international relations. The states making up the European
13 This interpretation is supported by recent monographic works, which confirm the polycentric
pattern from their own particular perspectives. Cf. Kurz, Sphere; Kelly, Emergencies.
Introduction 11
Community had already ensured that human rights formed an important political
stake in the CSCE process. Yet they all understood the idea differently, with some
seeing in it a complement to détente, while others aimed at a long-term under-
mining of the ‘Eastern Bloc’. Furthermore, African and Asian governments also
drew on the idea of human rights during this period. They, however, sought to use
it to back up their call for redistributing global economic resources. Finally, the
eighties also saw an attempt by Western governments, such as those of Ronald
Reagan in the USA or Helmut Kohl in the Federal Republic of Germany, to give a
conservative substance to human rights-based foreign policy. To do so, they
further accentuated the anti-communist slant but also developed a definition of
peace that was inextricably linked with liberal democracy—to make it clear in the
heated discussions of the ‘Second Cold War’ that no peaceful order was to be had
on communist terms. Consequently, in every period and in any given situation,
events in international human rights policy were determined by an array of factors,
and could never be reduced to a single cause.
Thirdly and lastly, this study emphasizes the ambivalence of human rights policy.
Initiatives launched in the name of human rights have always had many layers of
motivation. Truly humanitarian concern has rarely been the only underlying issue;
at times it has played no role at all. When, in the late forties, the American govern-
ment began a propaganda campaign against forced labour in the Soviet Union, it
may have benefited the detainees. American decision-makers, however, were more
concerned with discrediting the communist system. Non-governmental organiza-
tions lobbied the United Nations for universal standards, but often drew them up
with an eye to the groups they represented. When the states in the Council of
Europe threatened the Greek military government with expulsion, they wanted to
do something about the lack of political freedom in the country, but also cleared a
path for putting relations with Greece back on a viable footing outside the Council.
Campaigns against the military regime in Chile in turn demonstrate that criticism
of state-sponsored violence on human rights grounds could also be linked to many
other, heterogeneous concerns—the most important being the left-wing fight
against political opponents they considered ‘fascist’. A distinctly self-referential
element often came to the fore in this plurality of motivations. In the seventies,
activists from Amnesty International were concerned with moderating the suffering
of prisoners in distant countries, but also with documenting their own morality.
These multiple meanings were an important reason why, when put into practice,
human rights policy resulted in profound dilemmas and contradictions. Far from
being an exclusively moral vision, it was very often more of a tactical resource in
political confrontations. Most member states in the Council of Europe did not
want a strong protective system, which would perceptibly limit national sovereignty,
yet they entered into it nonetheless for purposes of political communitization.
Thus, they engendered the inherent absurdity of the European human rights
system: it was intended to secure the overarching community of values yet, if used,
it risked destroying that same community as members engaged in bitter criticism
of each other. In Latin America, while fear of external interference initially hindered
the creation of an international human rights system, it subsequently became the
grounds for actually establishing one in the revolutionary and counterrevolutionary

upheaval after the Cuban Revolution. Anti-colonial notions of human rights, for
their part, fluctuated between rejecting a supposedly hypocritical promise made by
colonial powers and adopting human rights ideas for the struggle against foreign
rule. The direction in which they turned often depended on the specific circum-
stances in which key players could use the idea. This ambivalence was perpetuated
in the postcolonial human rights discourse of the Global South. African politicians
and intellectuals rejected existing international standards of human rights because
they considered them a product of an alien ‘Western’ history. Yet at the same time,
they continued to draw upon the idea of human rights itself, not least to bolster
their claim for a fair world economic order. The political practice even of Amnesty
International was characterized by a series of inherent tensions. The London-based
organization was extremely efficient at attracting international attention, yet it
often dramatized and decontextualized political events. At the same time, Amnesty’s
commitment to human rights inaugurated a new global mission. That also held
true for Western governments: meddling while invoking apparently universal prin-
ciples became an essential characteristic of their human rights policy. And all the
actors had to grapple with the not infrequent unintended consequences of humani-
tarian campaigns. Dissidents befriended by international human rights NGOs
might find themselves placed more firmly in the firing line of state persecution.
And while dictatorships, such as that in Chile, sometimes reacted to criticism
by freeing prisoners, they might also respond by further turning the screws of
repression.
Given all of the above, the development of human rights policy is particularly
unsuited to producing a grand narrative. It is too hard to pin down to particular
places or personalities, and too changeable and contradictory. It is more a case of
offering medium-range historical explanations, some of which fit together, form-
ing overarching patterns of interpretation, while others resist an overly coherent
reading. The resulting picture is of a century marked by fractured transformation.
Nonetheless—or maybe precisely because of this—the history of human rights
enables us to open up important facets of international politics in this era and to
shed new light on more general questions prompted by historical research in recent
years. Thus, human rights constitute an important element in the transformation
of political language in the decades after the Second World War—including, but
not limited to, that of democracy.14 Moreover, human rights policy clearly demon-
strates that it was possible for non-state players, such as intergovernmental
organizations and, above all, transnational NGOs and social movements, to
decisively shape international relations—even though their dedication came up
against insurmountable barriers, as often as not.15 This history also opens up a
14 For further context see Jan-Werner Müller, Contesting Democracy. Political Ideas in Twentieth-
Century Europe (New Haven, CT, 2011).
15 On the general role of NGOs in international politics see: Akira Iriye, Global Community. The
Role of International Organizations in the Making of the Contemporary World (Berkeley, CA, 2002);
Jeremy Suri, ‘Non-Governmental Organizations and Non-State Actors’. In Palgrave Advances in
International History, edited by Patrick Finney (Basingstoke, 2005), pp. 223–46; Thomas Davies,
NGOs. A New History of Transnational Civil Society (London, 2013).
Introduction 13
specific viewpoint on the larger global conflicts in the period. It refines existing
reflection on the place of the Cold War in international politics by attesting to
the great formative power of this clash between systems, which also appropri-
ated the language of human rights, while simultaneously revealing the reasons
for the erosion of this formative power in the seventies and eighties.16 At the same
time, the field of human rights policy strikingly reveals the extent to which decol-
onization altered the international order and conflicting interests between the
global north and the postcolonial Global South were able to shape the geopolitical
arena. Lastly, the dynamics of human rights policy are particularly suited as part of
the effort to contribute to an understanding of the upheaval of the 1970s, so widely
discussed in recent years, precisely by pointing out that, in many cases, the long-
term effects of the decade’s new beginnings were not felt until ten years later.17
This study is a heavily abridged version of my book Die Ambivalenz des Guten [The
Ambivalence of the Good], published in German in 2014. I have attempted to
incorporate more recent literature where there seemed to be a close link to the
subject-matter under discussion. In doing so, I have concentrated on highlighting
areas where new fields of knowledge have been opened up and where my findings
tally with newer conclusions and positions, or where they diverge from them. I have
not changed the arguments underlying my book.
It is once again a great pleasure and joy to offer my thanks to the many colleagues
who have supported and nurtured this book along its way. The book owes a great
deal to many years of intellectual discussion with and encouragement of all kinds
from my colleagues in Freiburg: Ulrich Herbert, Hans Joas, Jörn Leonhard, Arvid
Schors, Thomas Zimmer, Patrick Wagner, as well as Norbert Frei (Jena). During
and after my work on the book, numerous colleagues allowed me to present and
discuss my ideas, read parts of the text, or entered into conversations from which
I learnt a great deal. Many thanks for this help to Arnd Bauerkämper, Stefan Berger,
Frank Bösch, Kathleen Canning, Kim Christiaens, Eckart Conze, Anselm Doering-
Manteuffel, Geoff Eley, Camilo Erlichman, Jörg Fisch, Isabel Heinemann, Dirk
van Laak, Sonja Levsen, Lutz Niethammer, Paul Nolte, Jürgen Osterhammel,
Joachim von Puttkamer, Lutz Raphael, Sven Reichardt, Martin Sabrow, Philipp
Sarasin, Stephan Scheuzger, Axel Schildt, Dirk Schumann, Detlef Siegfried,
Dietmar Süß, Willibald Steinmetz, Jakob Tanner, Petra Terhoeven, Cornelius
Torp, and Bernd Weisbrod, as well as members of the study group on Human
Rights in the 20th Century at the Fritz Thyssen Stiftung.
16 On reclassifying the place of the Cold War in international politics see: Melvyn Leffler and
Odd Arne Westad (eds), The Cambridge History of the Cold War, 3 volumes (Cambridge, 2010);
Richard H. Immerman and Petra Goedde (eds), The Oxford Handbook of the Cold War (Oxford, 2013).
17 For discussion of the 1970s, see: Anselm Doering-Manteuffel and Lutz Raphael, Nach dem
Boom. Perspektiven auf die Zeitgeschichte seit 1970 (Göttingen, 2008); Niall Ferguson et al. (eds), The
Shock of the Global. The 1970s in Perspective (Cambridge, MA, and London, 2010); Thomas
Borstelman, The 1970s. A New Global History from Civil Rights to Economic Inequality (Princeton, NJ,
2012); Daniel Rodgers, Age of Fracture (Cambridge, MA, 2011); Christan Caryl, Strange Rebels. 1979
and the Birth of the 21st Century (New York, 2014); Anselm Doering-Manteuffel, Lutz Raphael, and
Thomas Schlemmer (eds), Vorgeschichte der Gegenwart. Dimensionen des Strukturbruchs nach dem
Boom (Göttingen, 2016).
I am grateful to the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft for a research grant that

enabled me to spend a year at Columbia University in New York. Mark Mazower’s
intellectual support for the project was as great a stroke of luck for my research as
my intense, inspiring, and productively controversial dialogue with Samuel Moyn.
I also owe much to my conversations with Volker Berghahn, Greg Mann, and
Susan Pedersen. This, of course, also holds true for the colleagues who have
breathed such life into the field of the history of human rights in recent years;
contact and encounters with them made work on the book into a perennial, poly-
phonic, and richly rewarding conversation. Special thanks, then, go to Carl J. Bon
Tempo, Mark Philipp Bradley, Robert Brier, Gunter Dehnert, Celia Donert,
Benjamin Gilde, Michal Givoni, Lasse Heerten, Veronika Heyde, Stefan-Ludwig
Hoffmann, Steven Jensen, Patrick Kelly, Ara Keys, Benjamin Nathans, Jean
Quartaert, Ned Richardson-Little, Daniel Sargent, Brad Simpson, Lynsay Skiba,
Sarah Snyder, Simon Stevens, and Eric Weitz. I would also like to thank my
research assistants in Freiburg, Jena, Tübingen, and Cologne for their invaluable,
precise, and reliable assistance in both research and editorial work: Eva Bucher,
Sebastian Fahner, Isabel Flory, Sonja Friese, Rebekka Großmann, Cosima Götz,
Almut Holzem, Anastasiya Kazhan, Sven Löhr, Noemi Moosmann, Nikel Weis,
Valerie Schaab, Hannes Schweikardt, Milena Strümper, Claudio Stumpf, Sara
Weydner, Julian Zeller, and Insa von Zeppelin. I am very happy to have found a
congenial translator in Rachel Ward. Finally, the book has greatly benefited from
the excellent cooperation with and generous support from Richard Faber and
Cathryn Steele at Oxford University Press.
1
Prologue
The ‘Pre-History’ of Human Rights
as a Historiographical Problem
The politics of international human rights in the years after the Second World War
did not arise out of nowhere. Yet no matter what historical roots connected them
to earlier phases, the forties saw the emergence of a political field that was strik-
ingly novel in extent and internal coherence. It was only now that ‘human rights’
became the conceptual centre of resonant international political discourse. The
United Nations developed into the first international forum for systematic and
continual discussion of human rights issues. Never before had so many governments
generated positions on topics related to human rights, even if these initially often
remained rudimentary and limited largely to UN negotiations. Numerous inter-
national non-governmental organizations now began to see their work at least
partly in human rights terms. And, lastly yet significantly, there were now at
least a few international human rights NGOs in the narrower sense, i.e. organiza-
tions that observed a broad spectrum of human rights problems on a global scale.
While this unprecedented consolidation of international human rights politics
provides the most plausible starting point for a historical investigation of human
rights policy in the twentieth century, it remains important to consider how it fits
into earlier developments. No monolithic pre-history emerges from a study of the
more distant past, however. Instead, it opens up a historical space in which multiple
lines of development were laid out,1 all of which reveal the great differences
between earlier expressions of humanitarianism and human rights and those of
the twentieth century. Moreover, they show not a steady progression, but a trajec-
tory marked by changes and interruptions. Only a few areas display substantial
longer-term continuities, among the most important being the institutional stabil-
ity of internationalist NGOs, many of which arose in the late nineteenth century
and remained active for decades after the Second World War.
The late 1920s and 1930s constitute a significant preparatory phase for human
rights politics as they emerged in the forties. While institutional structures and
discourses surrounding human rights were hardly revolutionized, a wealth of
experience was accumulated in this time, from which key players would later
draw decisive lessons. These experiences included the frailty of international
1 Cf. also the conclusions of Philip Alston, ‘Does the Past Matter? On the Origins of Human
Rights’. In Harvard Law Review 126 (2013), pp. 2043–81.
security, the political problems generated by protecting minorities, as overseen

by the League of Nations, and the attacks on democracy launched predomin-
antly by fascist movements.
The conclusions that key players inferred from these experiences became
sharply delineated during the Second World War, which marks the emergence of
international human rights politics in the stricter sense. Civil activists in particular
now began to see an urgent need to create international human rights guarantees,
and various perceptions combined in their endeavours. The idea that universal
legal safeguards would make it easier to protect minorities within the nation state
was a major contributory factor here. The same held true for the notion of rehabili-
tating the individual in an anti-totalitarian spirit, seen as necessary for limiting the
highly disruptive omnipotence of the state. The most important formative pattern,
however, can be seen in the key role attributed to human rights as an essential means
of preserving world peace. International rights guarantees were intended to prevent
radical regimes from unleashing their destructive dynamic, and thus to reduce the
risk of war—in overall terms, this constituted the strongest motivation for the turn
towards human rights in the 1940s. Furthermore, an act of institutionalization—
the decision to incorporate human rights provisions into the Charter of the fledg-
ling United Nations organization—proved crucial in enabling a political field to
emerge from it. The implications of this step would prove enormous. At its heart
lay a paradox, however, for the architects of the new international organization
actually sought to prevent human rights from taking on too great a significance.
By contrast, the discourse was not defined by public appeals to the suffering of
others. The human rights advocates were undoubtedly sympathetic observers of
world events, and the human catastrophes entailed by war had not escaped them.
Yet governmental decision-making, NGO submissions, books, treatises, and later
speeches and statements made by UN delegates seldom vividly evoked human
misery, existential distress, or physical torment. A politics of suffering and compas-
sion developed in a rudimentary fashion at best.
R E C E N T A N D D I S TA N T PA S T S
The distant past of twentieth-century human rights politics is not uniform but
rather consists of a variety of possible points of origin, depending on the particular
phenomenon under consideration. An enquiry into the history of human rights
NGOs could begin with the abolitionist movement of the late eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries. Meanwhile, nineteenth-century humanitarian interventions
represent a decisive point of reference for understanding the evolution of human
rights or closely related concerns in state policies. Other approaches would entail
other perspectives. A focus on protecting individuals from the grasp of state
authority might consider the medieval contract of sovereignty, and would certainly
include political philosophy and state theory since the sixteenth century. If we take
intergovernmental organizations as fundamental to the context of human rights
policy since 1945, we need only look back as far as the League of Nations and its
Prologue 17
attempts to protect minorities, colonial peoples, or women and children. Some of

these historical strands are linked—abolitionists, for example, were inspired by
discussions of the American and French Revolutions, while later proponents of
humanitarian intervention on behalf of Ottoman Christians drew in turn on
abolitionist campaigning techniques. Other trends, however, played out over
entirely different eras, or ran in unrelated parallel.
If we look more closely, virtually all of these multiple strands reveal that historical
divergence was more significant than continuity. Thus, the declarations of rights
drawn up in the course of the American and French Revolutions differ markedly
from each other, and to an even greater extent from the international human rights
declarations made from the mid-twentieth century onwards.2 Ideas of natural law
or human rights were relatively flexible lines of argument in the revolutionary era.
The American Declaration of Independence of 1776, for example, of marginal
significance in its day, referred back to natural law in justifying the separation from
the British Crown and establishing the new state’s sovereignty. It was not the
document’s intention to lay down individual rights—which it only expressed by
implication. Notions of natural law served a different purpose, by contrast, in both
the 1776 Virginia Bill of Rights and the French revolutionary Declaration of the
Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 1789: they were to be the ultimate justifica-
tion for the foundation of the state. Legislative and executive power was linked to
the ‘droits naturels, inaliénables et sacrés de l’homme’, as the French text put it.
Each declaration constituted a highly symbolic speech act, with which groups
established themselves as a political community. If the Universal Declaration of
2 Cf. on the USA, Declaration of Independence, 1776 http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/

declaration_transcript.html; David Armitage,The Declaration of Independence. A Global History
(Cambridge, MA, 2007); Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge,
MA, 1967); James H. Hutson, ‘The Bill of Rights and the American Revolutionary Experience’.
In A Culture of Rights. The Bill of Rights in Philosophy, Politics, and Law—1791 and 1991,
edited by Michael J. Lacey and Knud Haakonssen (Cambridge, UK, 1991), pp. 62–97; Pauline
Meier, American Scripture. Making the Declaration of Independence (New York, 1998); John Philip Reid,
‘The Irrelevance of the Declaration’. In Law in the American Revolution and the Revolution in the Law.
A Collection on the Review Essays on American Legal History, edited by Hendrik Hartog (New York
and London, 1981), pp. 46–89; Allen Robert Rutland, The Birth of the Bill of Rights (Chapel Hill,
NC, 1955); Gerald Stourzh, ‘Zur Konstitutionalisierung der Individualrechte in der Amerikanischen
und Französischen Revolution’. In Wege zur Grundrechtsdemokratie. Studien zur Begriffs- und
Institutionengeschichte des liberalen Verfassungsstaats, edited by idem (Vienna and Cologne, 1989),
pp. 155–74; Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (New York, 1969);
Michael P. Zuckert, Natural Rights and the New Republicanism (Princeton, NJ, 1994); Jürgen
Heideking, Die Verfassung vor dem Richterstuhl. Vorgeschichte und Ratifizierung der amerikanischen
Verfassung 1787–1791 (Berlin and New York, 1988). On France, see: Déclaration des droits de l’homme
et du citoyen, 1789, http://www.assemblee-nationale.fr/histoire/dudh/1789.asp; Keith Michael Baker,
‘The Idea of a Declaration of Rights’. In The French Idea of Freedom. The Old Regime and the Declaration
of Rights of 1789, edited by Dale van Kley (Stanford, CA, 1994), pp. 154–96; Günter Birtsch,
‘Revolution und Menschenrechte. Zur Geschichte der Grund- und Freiheitsrechte vor und nach
1789’. In Die Französische Revolution. Forschung—Geschichte – Wirkung, edited by Helmut Reinalter
(Frankfurt am Main, 1991), pp. 157–74; Hunt, The French Revolution and Human Rights. A Brief
Documentary History (Boston, MA, 1996); idem, Inventing Human Rights. A History (New York and
London, 2017); Sigmar-Jürgen Samwer, Die französische Erklärung der Menschen- und Bürgerrechte von
1789/91 (Hamburg, 1970); Jürgen Sandweg, Rationales Naturrecht als revolutionäre Praxis.
Untersuchungen zur ‘Erklärung der Menschen- und Bürgerrechte’ von 1789 (Berlin, 1972).
Human Rights lacked the binding force to be considered such a constitutional action,
the categorical difference becomes fully apparent when we take into account the
fact that it was an international document agreed upon by dozens of governments.
The list of such differences in the long-term history of human rights would be a
long one: the old religions were concerned with protecting life, yet formulated
commandments and established no legal rights. The nineteenth-century policy of
military intervention in the name of humanity differed from the twentieth-century
version in that it was overwhelmingly concerned with the fate of Christians.3 The
League of Nations sought a system for protecting minorities, or acting against the
‘white slave trade’, as I will touch on later, in order to establish international super-
vision to protect people from the grip of state authority. Yet it did not create any
kind of institutional context in which the human rights implications of every sub-
ject could always be discussed.
These differences in kind are one reason why the pre-history of human rights
policy cannot be explained as a coherent, steady development. It is marked by
ruptures, broken lines of tradition, and by many short-lived political constella-
tions. No other state initially subscribed to the revolutionary French human rights
tradition. By 1799, the French constitution no longer mentioned human rights,
and the Charte Constitutionelle of 1814 avoided reference to any pre-constitutional
rights. This tendency continued in German-speaking territories. None of the
constitutions issued by 1848/9 contained the notion of natural laws or mentioned
human rights.4 Instead, the prevailing model developed into one of ‘subjects’
rights’ or ‘citizens’ rights’: that is, the rights that the state guaranteed to its inhabit-
ants, so long as they were members of the state—and specifically not just because
they were human beings. Other phenomena have similarly intermittent histories.
In some societies, slavery represented the epitome of moral provocation between
the late eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries—but not before, or afterwards.
Military interventions on humanitarian grounds conglomerated in the first two
3 Cf. particularly Davide Rodogno, Against Massacre. Humanitarian Interventions in the Ottoman
Empire, 1815–1914. The Emergence of a European Concept and International Practice (Princeton, NJ,
2012); Brendan Simms and D. J. B. Trim (eds), Humanitarian Intervention. A History (Cambridge,
UK, and New York, 2011); Fabian Klose (ed.), The Emergence of Humanitarian Intervention. Ideas and
Practice from the Nineteenth Century to the Present (Cambridge, UK, 2016). For earlier texts see:
Martha Finnemore, ‘Constructing Norms of Humanitarian Intervention’. In The Culture of National
Security. Norms and Identity in World Politics, edited by Peter J. Katzenstein (New York, 1996), pp.
153–85; Gary J. Bass, Freedom’s Battle. The Origins of Humanitarian Intervention (New York, 2008).
See also Wilhelm Grewe, Epochen der Völkerrechtsgeschichte (Baden-Baden, 1984), pp. 573–83.
4 On the following see: Otto Dann, ‘Die Proklamation von Grundrechten in den deutschen
Revolutionen von 1848/49’. In Grund- und Freiheitsrechte im Wandel von Gesellschaft und Geschichte.
Beiträge zur Geschichte der Grund- und Freiheitsrechte vom Ausgang des Mittelalters bis zur Revolution
von 1848, edited by Günter Birtsch (Göttingen, 1981), pp. 515–32; Gerd Kleinheyer, ‘Grundrechte,
Menschen- und Bürgerrechte, Volksrechte’. In Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, Vol. 2, edited by Otto
Brunner et al. (Stuttgart, 1975), pp. 1047–82; Heinrich Scholler (ed.), Die Grundrechtsdiskussion in
der Paulskirche. Eine Dokumentation (Darmstadt, 1982); Suppé, Die Grund- und Menschenrechte in der
deutschen Staatslehre des 19. Jahrhunderts (Berlin, 2004). As source material cf. Johann Gustav Droysen,
Die Verhandlungen des Verfassungs-Ausschusses der Deutschen Nationalversammlung (Leipzig, 1849);
Konrad Dietrich Haßler (ed.), Verhandlungen der deutschen verfassunggebenden Reichsversammlung, 6
volumes (Frankfurt am Main, 1848–9).
Prologue 19
thirds of the nineteenth century and the 1990s. International criminal tribunals, as
established in Nuremberg and Tokyo after the Second World War, represented a
tool that was not taken up again until the end of the Cold War.
Finally, those long-term historical connections that can be identified are not all
of the same kind. In many cases, they are not so much a matter of continuities as
of parallels or analogies. This can be illustrated by reference to British activism
against slavery, which flourished in times of societal upheaval and political crisis,
particularly in the 1770s and 1780s, and then again in the 1820s and 1830s. At
those moments, the moral politics represented by abolitionism seemed a promis-
ing way of seeing off old-fashioned political ideas and renewing British politics and
society.5 And precisely because combating the slave trade or slavery could be the
driver of a multipurpose movement for political renewal, various players attempted
to mobilize it for a range of reform projects—purifying their own religious sect, as
the Quakers intended, cleansing the British national character, or giving new
legitimacy to imperial rule. Human rights policy in the 1970s was characterized by
a similarly multifunctional promise of sociopolitical change, as this study will
show—although the historical circumstances are, of course, very different.
Nonetheless, the distinction between parallels and continuities does not mean
that there are no historical continuities to be found. A limited number can indeed
be identified, although they are rare when the field is viewed as a whole. Thus, the
social basis underlying engagement in humanitarian or human rights issues
remained essentially the same throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—
the vast majority of those involved were recruited from the bourgeois middle
classes (however much the character of those classes changed over the decades).
Similarly, nineteenth-century public support was mobilized in fundamentally the
same manner as in the late twentieth century: via symbolic political protests such
as consumer boycotts, using human-interest stories to appeal to empathy, and
targeted political lobbying.
We should also add certain institutional continuities that repay more detailed
study. After all, the majority of the non-governmental organizations that partici-
pated in the work of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights after the
Second World War were founded at the high points of liberal internationalism
towards the end of the nineteenth century, and in the late 1920s and 1930s.6 Their
human rights activism was thus a result of longer-standing political developments.
If we take a closer look at these organizations’ histories, we can make out three
main lines of tradition issuing from the nineteenth century. They created a framework
5 Cf. Christopher Leslie Brown, Moral Capital. Foundations of British Abolitionism (Chapel Hill,
NC, 2006).
6 On the background see: John Boli and George M. Thomas, ‘World Culture in the World Polity:
A Century of International Non-Governmental Organization’. In American Sociological Review 62
(1997), pp. 171–90; Jeremi Suri, ‘Non-Governmental Organizations and Non-State Actors’. In Palgrave
Advances in International History, edited by Patrick Finney (Basingstoke, 2005), pp. 223–46. More
generally cf. F. S. L. Lyons, Internationalism in Europe 1815–1914 (Leiden 1963); Martin H. Geyer and
Johannes Paulmann (eds), The Mechanics of Internationalism. Culture, Society, and Politics from the 1840s
to the First World War (Oxford, 2001); Steve Charnovitz, ‘Nongovernmental Organizations and
International Law’. In American Journal of International Law 100 (2006), pp. 348–72.
of ideas and practices within which non-governmental groups could later adapt the
notion of human rights in the 1940s more easily. In this way, they provided a
striking element of continuity for their activism.
The first of these strands involved forms of transnational solidarity, including
cross-border interventions on behalf of hard-pressed groups. This related to
national Jewish organizations such as the Alliance Israélite Universelle (established
1860), the Anglo-Jewish Association (1871), or the American Jewish Committee
(1906), which worked to improve living conditions for their coreligionists over-
seas, and not least to protect them from physical danger.7 Forms of transnational
solidarity also took shape in the women’s movement during these years. In the last
two decades of the century, three large umbrella groups developed, which formed
the most significant hubs of internationalist activism: the International Council of
Women (1888), the International Women’s Suffrage Alliance (1904), and the
Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (1926). All three would
later send observers to the negotiations at the United Nations Commission on
Human Rights.8 It should not be overlooked, however, that the transnational
advocacy of Jewish and women’s organizations had a specific character insofar as it
largely represented an internationalized group solidarity. The aid provided by these
organizations transcended the nation state, but remained at heart limited to
members of their own groups—whether women or Jews.
Another line of tradition consists of legal argumentation. Two sets of ideas,
conspicuously linked with later international notions of human rights, had been
firmly anchored in the conceptual world of international NGOs since the nineteenth
century. One was the notion that disadvantaged groups could best be protected by
securing their rights. The demand for states to grant individual or group rights,
‘fundamental rights’ as German constitutionalism put it, was one of the most
important tools in marginalized groups’ struggle to be fully integrated in the
national constitutional state—this held equally true for Jews, women, and the
working classes.9 The unifying factor in the second wave of the women’s move-
ment, which peaked from the 1890s onwards, was the demand for equal civil
rights and especially for the right to vote. Although this related to women’s p
osition
within the nation state, the debate around suffrage was conducted on an
international level.10 The other significant idea was that international relations
7 Cf. Lisa Moses Leff, Sacred Bonds of Solidarity. The Rise of Jewish Internationalism in Nineteenth-
Century France (Stanford, CA, 2006); The Anglo-Jewish Association, Consultative Council of Jewish
Organizations (London, 1952); Michael Galchinsky, Jews and Human Rights. Dancing at Three
Weddings (Lanham, MD, 2008), pp. 29–50; Nathan Feinberg, ‘The International Protection of
Human Rights and the Jewish Question. An Historical Survey’. In Israel Law Review 3 (1968),
pp. 487–500.
8 For more on the following, see: Leila J. Rupp, ‘Constructing Internationalism. The Case of
Transnational Women’s Organizations, 1888-1945’. In American Historical Review 99 (1994),
pp. 1571–1600’; eadem, Worlds of Women. The Making of an International Women’s Movement
(Princeton, NJ, 1997); Annika Wilmers, Pazifismus in der internationalen Frauenbewegung 1914–1920
(Essen, 2008), particularly pp. 16–21.
9 Cf. Hunt, Revolution; idem, Inventing Human Rights. A History (New York and London, 2007);
Karen Offen, European Feminisms, 1700–1950. A Political History (Stanford, CA, 2000).
10 Cf. Arvonne Fraser, ‘Becoming Human: The Origins and Development of Women’s Human
Rights’. In HRQ 21 (1999), pp. 853–906.
Prologue 21
could be pacified through legal proceedings. Thus, there was an unprecedented

surge in the study of international law in the last third of the nineteenth century.11
The exponents of this school of thought were lawyers and pacifists, and in some
cases also politicians and diplomats. They sought to use international law to
regulate the relationships between states—if only the ‘civilized’ ones—in the same
way that national law regulated the relationships between individuals within the
state. Thinking on international law found enormously widespread distribution
within the circle of internationalist organizations, most notably via the idea of
arbitration, which lawyers and activists proposed as its crucial mechanism.12
A third conceptual and political framework for internationalist activities, which
would later be integrated seamlessly into the idea of human rights, was the
commitment to a peaceful and just international order. Pacifism too had gained
unforeseen strength since around 1880.13 For all the movement’s national and
political heterogeneity, numerous internationalist NGOs were interwoven with it
in terms of institutions, personnel, or ideology. These included international law
associations, women’s organizations, or the Inter-Parliamentary Union, which was
founded in 1889.14 Peace work also had an important preparatory role to play,
since, as I will show, human rights policy in the forties essentially arose from the
attempt to create more stable security structures.
Interestingly, the late nineteenth century saw another new kind of non-
governmental activism in the form of national civil rights organizations. In 1898,
the French Ligue des Droits de l’Homme was founded, while the Deutsche Liga
für Menschenrechte and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) arose in the
early twenties, and the British National Council on Civil Liberties was established
in 1934.15 Although they cannot be taken as a fourth line of development for
11 Cf. Martin Koskenniemi, The Gentle Civilizer of Nations. The Rise and Fall of International Law
1870–1960 (Cambridge, UK, 2002).
12 Sandi Cooper, Patriotic Pacifism. Waging War on War in Europe, 1815–1914 (New York, 1991),
pp. 91–115; David Cortright, Peace. A History of Movements and Ideas (Cambridge, UK, 2008);
Grewe, Epochen, pp. 606–15; Gertrude Bussey and Margaret Tims, Women’s International League for
Peace and Freedom, 1915–1965. A Record of Fifty Years’ Work (London, 1965).
13 Cf. Cortright, Peace; Cooper, Pacifism; Jost Dülffer, Regeln gegen den Krieg? Die Haager
Friedenskonferenzen von 1899 und 1907 in der internationalen Politik (Berlin, 1981).
14 Cf. Frederic Kirgis, ‘The Formative Years of the American Society of International Law’. In
American Journal of International Law 90 (1996), pp. 559–89; Geoffrey Best, ‘Peace Conferences and
the Century of Total War. The 1899 Hague Conference and What Came After’. In International
Affairs 75, No. 3 (1999), pp. 619–34; Bob Reinalda and Natascha Verhaaren, Vrouwenbeweging en
internationale organisaties, 1868–1986. Een vergeten hoofdstuk uit de geschiedenis van de internationale
betrekkingen (Nijmegen, 1989); Dülffer, Regeln.
15 On the following see: William D. Irvine, Between Justice and Politics. The Ligue des Droits de
l’Homme, 1898–1945 (Stanford, CA, 2007); Deutsche Liga für Menschenrechte, 40 Jahre Kampf um
Menschenrechte (Berlin, 1953); Werner Fritsch, ‘Deutsche Liga für Menschenrechte (DLfM) 1922–1933’.
In Lexikon zur Parteiengeschichte, Vol. 1, edited by Dieter Fricke et al. (Cologne, 1983), pp. 749–59;
Lothar Mertens, Unermüdlicher Kämpfer für Frieden und Menschenrechte. Leben und Wirken von
Kurt R. Grossmann (Berlin, 1997); idem, ‘Die “Deutsche Liga für Menschenrechte” in der Weimarer
Republik’. In Geist und Gestalt in historischem Wandel. Facetten deutscher und europäischer Geschichte
1789–1989. Festschrift für Siegfried Bahne, edited by Bert Becker (Münster, 2000), pp. 257–69;
Artur D. Brenner, Emil J. Gumbel, Weimar German Pacifist and Professor (Boston, MA, and Leiden,
2001); Alexander Schwitanski, Die Freiheit des Volksstaats. Die Entwicklung der Grund- und Menschenrechte
und die deutsche Sozialdemokratie bis zum Ende der Weimarer Republik (Essen, 2008), pp. 257–83;
human rights engagement in the second post-war era, they attest to a revealing
affinity. On the surface, these leagues differed from the internationally oriented
NGOs in that they remained focused on the nation state. Yet they stood up for
many of the same rights as the later international human rights organizations—for
freedom of association and of opinion, against racial discrimination, for political
prisoners and foreigners, and much more besides. Moreover, all four organizations
aspired to impartiality, thus basing their work, at least in theory, on a generalized
solidarity, not linked to particular groups or special social interests. At the same
time, they were all undeniably aligned to the political left—these two features were
also highly characteristic of the human rights movement in the sixties and seventies.
Finally, the borderline between national and international engagement was more
porous than the predominantly national range of the civil rights organizations
could suggest. It was not at all rare for them to protest against rights abuses in other
countries.16 On the whole, the political make-up of these leagues attests to the
widespread plausibility and even fascination of a set of ideas centred on peace,
protection under the law, and justice, which reveals both national and international
NGOs as two different expressions of similar political driving forces. In any case,
it was easy for individual activists to move between the two spheres. Thus, the
founders of the International League for the Rights of Man in the early forties
included Roger Baldwin, Emil Julius Gumbel, Justin Godart, Jean-Baptiste Perrin,
and Henri Lauguier, who had all previously been involved in national rights
organizations.17 These personal links resulted in a trickle of historical continuity
running between the national leagues and the international human rights NGOs.
There is one final level that we should consider alongside historical analogies and
continuities: yet another kind of historical connection created when protagonists
deliberately picked up on earlier ideas or practices. Explicit references to, and the
reception of, earlier rights discourses are particularly important because they
highlight those past developments that provided human rights advocates with
actual guidance. Thus, the officials in the United Nations Secretariat and members
of the UN human rights commission, who drafted the Universal Declaration of
Human Rights, factored the revolutionary declaration of rights into their consid-
erations, along with an array of other fundamental legal, philosophical, and
theoretical texts from preceding centuries. Similarly, Amnesty International, for
example, attempted to forge symbolic links with abolitionism, to draw on its
historic reputation. This was why two of its major thematic campaigns in the
Samuel Walker, In Defense of American Liberties. A History of the ACLU (New York and Oxford, 1990);
Robert C. Cottrell, Roger Nash Baldwin and the American Civil Liberties Union (New York, 2000);
John Fabian Witt, Patriots and Cosmopolitans. Hidden Histories of American Law (Cambridge, MA,
and London, 2007), pp. 157–208; Mark Lilly, The National Council for Civil Liberties. The First Fifty
Years (London and Basingstoke, 1984); Tom Buchanan, ‘Human Rights Campaigns in Modern
Britain’. In NGOs in Contemporary Britain. Non-State Actors in Society and Politics since 1945, edited
by Crowson et al. (Basingstoke, 2009), pp. 113–28).
16 See, for example, articles in the journal Die Menschenrechte, esp. Die Menschenrechte 2 (1927),
No. 6, p. 7; ibid., No. 7, p. 5; ibid., No. 9, p. 12; ibid., No. 10, p. 12; ibid. 5 (1930), No. 1/2, pp.
2–8; ibid., No. 8, pp. 7–9; ibid. 7 (1932), No. 2, pp. 33 et seq.
17 Cf. minutes of earlier meetings in RU, FGP, Box 23, and files in NYPL, ILRM, Boxes 9 and 10.
Prologue 23
seventies were known as the ‘Campaign for the Abolition of Torture’ and the
‘Campaign for the Abolition of the Death Penalty’.
E X P E R I E N C E S O F T H E I N T E RWA R P E R I O D
Looking at the range of experiences that inspired human rights work in the 1940s,
the interwar years play a particularly salient role. This is not because it was a period
of fundamental breakthroughs in human rights policy; instead, world events of the
twenties and thirties constituted a key backdrop for the experts and activists who
drew up proposals for international standards and institutions in the early forties,
making a major contribution to the emergence of human rights as a policy area
after the end of the Second World War.
International law experts had been discussing the possibility of compiling an
international human rights declaration since the 1920s. This is, to all intents and
purposes, the earliest point at which the idea became readily tangible—although
one or two internationally minded lawyers had made similar observations in the
late nineteenth century.18 The debates bore fruit insofar as the Institut de Droit
International in Ghent and the Académie Diplomatique Internationale in Paris
adopted resolutions that actually entitled international declarations of human
rights in 1928/29.19 André Mandelstam was a leading figure in these initiatives;
a Russian lawyer and diplomat, born in 1869, he had gone into exile in Paris after
the Russian Revolution.20 He had spent many years working at the embassy in
Constantinople, and his deep dismay at the Ottoman massacres of the Armenians
before and during the First World War had spurred him to consider a right to
humanitarian intervention.21 Mandelstam’s proposals for an international
declaration of human rights were rooted in the pacifist ideas of the late nineteenth
century, aiming to keep the peace through safeguards in international law.22 Their
significance did not lie in having struck a great chord. Instead, they anticipated
the core concept that would inspire American internationalists and European
politicians in exile to work for international human rights guarantees during the
Second World War.
18 Cf. Pasquale Fiore, Le droit international codifié et sa sanction juridique (Paris, 1911 [first pub-
lished 1890]), pp. 339–65. Cf. Koskenniemi, Civilizer, pp. 1–97.
19 A similar declaration by the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom in 1938/39
had less visibility. Cf. Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (henceforth: WILPF),
Report of its Work with the United Nations (s.l., 1949).
20 Cf. Herman J. Burgers, ‘André Mandelstam, Forgotten Pioneer of International Human Rights’.
In Rendering Justice to the Vulnerable, edited by Fons Coomans et al. (The Hague, 2000), pp. 69–82.
21 Cf. Karl Josef Partsch, ‘Die Armenierfrage und das Völkerrecht in der Zeit des Ersten Weltkrieges.
Zum Wirken von André Mandelstam’. In Genozid und Moderne, Vol. 1, Strukturen kollektiver Gewalt
im 20. Jh., edited by Mihran Dabag and Kristin Platt (Opladen, 1998), pp. 338–46.
22 André Mandelstam, ‘Der internationale Schutz der Menschenrechte und die New Yorker
Erklärung des Instituts für Völkerrecht’. In Zeitschrift für ausländisches öffentliches Recht und Völkerrecht
2 (1931), pp. 335–77, here pp. 374 et seq. On the following, see also idem, Les droits internationaux
de l’homme (Paris, 1931); and idem, ‘Les dernières phases du mouvement pour la protection interna-
tionale des droits de l’homme’. In Revue de Droit International 12 (1933), pp. 469–510.
Moreover, the Russian lawyer was already learning from the operational problems
of interwar minority protection. Mandelstam considered the minority treaties to
be a great step forward, but saw the political dissatisfaction they provoked as too
onerous for international relations. Consequently, he called for them to be replaced
by a ‘global contract on human rights’.23 At this time, the League of Nations was
also discussing the idea of generalizing minority protection. This was naturally
proposed mainly by the (South-)Eastern and Central European states which had
been required to sign the existing treaties. They found only occasional support
from other countries’ delegates.24 In 1933, the Greek lawyer and former minister
Antoine Frangulis, co-founder of the Académie Diplomatique Internationale,
presented the League of Nations with a proposal on international human rights
protection precisely along the lines that Mandelstam had been thinking along.25
But the proposal received very little support and was not even debated. As I will
show, numerous human rights advocates in the forties would restart from this
point. For many of them, the weakness of the minority protection system was a key
factor underlying their thoughts on human rights guarantees.
The League of Nations should not be underestimated here as an element of
continuity, and more generally as a significant hub in the genesis of international
human rights policy in the 1940s. After all, many internationalist activists were
working as advisers or lobbyists to the newly founded organization. In Geneva,
they were accumulating a reservoir of practical experience and political expertise to
draw on in their work for the United Nations after the Second World War.26
Crossovers to that institution’s later work could be incredibly fluid, as illustrated by
activities to counter so-called ‘white slavery’, a label which hid a transnational
syndrome of state-tolerated prostitution and trafficking of women.27 With the
active involvement of numerous women’s organizations, the League of Nations
created a legal and institutional framework for reform efforts, although its
immediate impact on governmental policy remained slight. The League adopted
two conventions, in 1921 and 1933, and prepared a third, which could not be
23 Mandelstam, ‘Schutz der Menschenrechte’, p. 376. Mandelstam modelled his draft for the
Institut de Droit International’s declaration on the minority treaties. Cf. Karl Josef Partsch,
‘Menschenrechte und Minderheitenschutz. Zu den Arbeiten des Institut de Droit international in der
Zwischenkriegszeit’ In Völkerrecht als Rechtsordnung—internationale Gerichtsbarkeit—Menschenrechte.
Fs. Hermann Mosler, edited by Rudolf Bernhardt et al. (Berlin, 1983), pp. 649–59.
24 Cf. Mandelstam, ‘Les dernières phases du mouvement pour la protection internationale des
droits de l’homme’, p. 506.
25 Cf. ibid., pp. 90 et seq.
26 Cf. Carole Fink, Defending the Rights of Others. The Great Powers, the Jews, and International
Minority Protection, 1878–1938 (Cambridge, UK, 2004), pp. 133–358; see also Feinberg, ‘Protection’;
Inter-Parliamentary Union, The Inter-Parliamentary Union. Its Work and its Organization (Genf,
1948); James Douglas, Parliaments across Frontiers. A Short History of the Inter-Parliamentary Union
(London, 1975).
27 On the following see: Carol Miller, ‘ “Geneva—the Key to Equality”. Inter-War Feminists and
the League of Nations’. In Women’s History Review 3 (1994), pp. 219–45; eadem, ‘The Social Section
and Advisory Committee on Social Questions of the League of Nations’. In International Health
Organisations and Movements, 1918–1939, edited by Paul Weindling (Cambridge, UK, 1995),
pp. 154–75; Barbara Metzger, ‘Towards an International Human Rights Regime during the Inter-War
Years. The League of Nations’ Combat of Traffic in Women and Children’. In Beyond Sovereignty.
Britain, Empire and Transnationalism, c. 1880–1950, edited by Kevin Grant et al. (Basingstoke, 2007),
pp. 54–79.
Prologue 25
concluded because of the war. At least some of the women’s activists came close to
taking a human rights approach. Sometimes called ‘abolitionists’, they fought the
‘white slave trade’ as a state-backed breach of women’s rights and demanded
protective legislation against the abuse. They apparently even used the term
‘human rights’ from the late thirties onwards.28 After the Second World War, the
UN Commission on the Status of Women would pick up the League of Nations’
work almost seamlessly. The 1949 ‘Convention for the Suppression of the Traffic
in Persons and of the Exploitation of the Prostitution of Others’, for example,
finalized the League of Nations’ project abandoned during the Second World War.
It would be incorrect, however, to assume that most post-war human rights
work was able to follow up on the successes of the League of Nations. It is true that
the vast majority of internationalist groups in the forties developed their ideas by
reference to its policies—yet it mainly served as a negative image. Almost all those
involved were seeking to construct a new global organization in which the
weaknesses and dysfunctionalities of its predecessor would be remedied.29 The
very notion of giving international human rights protection a new profile, and
anchoring it firmly to institutions, was an essential part of this disengagement.
This will to create something new emerges very vividly when we consider the
self-perception of those who drafted human rights protection schemes during the
Second World War. They rarely saw themselves as building on earlier work such as
nineteenth-century humanitarian interventions, protests against the ‘Congo atro
cities’ in the early twentieth century, or the interwar declarations of rights. Instead,
they were developing their plans on the clear assumption that they would radically
rebuild international relations. The world needed nothing less than ‘a revolution-
ary change in the status of the individual’, according to Hersch Lauterpacht.
A British international lawyer of Polish-Jewish origin, he was one of the most
important voices calling for an international system of human rights protection
during and after the Second World War.30 The belief in the innovative nature of
the undertaking displayed by Lauterpacht and others was bound up with the
perceptive insight that it would be a difficult task, possibly almost hopeless, for
these ideas to gain ascendancy over the notion of national sovereignty which had
been dominant for centuries. The renowned historian James Shotwell, one of the
most active American backers of an international organization, acknowledged that:
Throughout all modern history, international law as well as the practices of diplomacy
have recognized the rights of sovereign states to deal with their own citizens with only
mild protests from other governments in cases of persecution and tyranny.31
28 Cf. Miller‚ ‘Geneva’, fn 3.

29 On the American internationalists see: Commission to Study the Organization of Peace (hence-
forth: CSOP), ‘Fourth Report of the Commission to Study the Organization of Peace’. In International
Conciliation 396 (January 1944), pp. 5–110; on the European federalists, Ronald W. G. MacKay,
Peace Aims and the New Order (New York, 1941), p. 117.
30 Hersch Lauterpacht, An International Bill of the Rights of Man (New York, 1945), p. 145. See also
Wright, ‘Human Rights and the World Order’. In International Conciliation 389 (April 1943),
pp. 238–62; Edvard Beneš, ‘The Rights of Man and International Law’. In Czechoslovak Yearbook of
International Law (London, 1942), pp. 1–6.
31 James Shotwell, Great Decision (New York, 1944), pp. 179 et seq. On Shotwell cf. Harold
Josephson, James T. Shotwell and the Rise of Internationalism in America (Cranbury, NJ, 1975).
Shotwell’s rather discouraging historical summary was a fair assessment of future

prospects, as most human rights advocates saw them in the forties.
S E C U R I N G H U M A N R I G H T S TO P R E V E N T
WA R — D I S C O U R S E I N T H E E A R LY 19 40 S
The 1940s were the moment when talk of international human rights guarantees
began to consolidate. Amongst the unprecedented material and emotional desola-
tion unleashed by the Second World War, ideas blossomed for what a better
political order might—or would have to—look like to prevent the world sinking
into another catastrophe in the future. Human rights became a visible element of
these discussions and thus also gained entry into international politics. Yet we
should keep our view of this development in due proportion. Notions of human
rights and international law were a small hub within an incredibly wide-reaching,
controversial, and contradictory discourse on the post-war order. It spanned the
social reshaping of democracy, the transformation of international economic
cooperation, ‘developing’ the colonies, containing state aggression, world nutrition,
global health, and the question of what should happen to the millions of refugees
and displaced persons. Although the notion of human rights gained a foothold
in these debates about viable international coexistence, most of the discussions
had nothing to do with it.
The central context in which such ideas arose was a specific diagnosis of the
dangers posed to international security in an age of radical dictatorships. This pro-
posed a nexus between internal repression and external belligerence. In this view,
intergovernmental human rights guarantees were an indispensable aspect of secur-
ing peace. In the lively American debates around the future world order and the
role that the United States should play within it, it was mainly pacifist, Christian,
and women’s groups who made this idea their own, as did international lawyers.32
Socially, this was a small, homogeneous, and exclusive minority. Most of its repre-
sentatives adhered to (left) liberal, or even moderately socialist, ideas and came
from the Protestant, academically educated middle class. Moreover, the individual
groups were closely interrelated.33 While the internationalist groups had initially
struggled in US domestic politics after the First World War, from around 1943/44
their opinions became almost mainstream in public debate. This surprising
turnaround had much to do with the fact that the internationalist groups were able
to argue persuasively that the new war confirmed the prescriptions they had put
forward in the interwar period. They suggested that the first post-war order had
32 On the debate in general see e.g. Clarence K. Streit, Union Now (London, 1939), p. 132; Ely
Culbertson, Total Peace. What Makes Wars and How to Organize Peace (New York, 1943); Carl Becker,
How New Will the Better World Be? A Discussion of Post-War Reconstruction (New York, 1944); Charles
Beard, The Republic. Conversations on Fundamentals (New York, 1944).
33 This becomes clear from a systematic evaluation of the information from Divine and Chance.
On the social background, see also David Steigerwald, Wilsonian Idealism in America (Ithaca, NY, and
London, 1994), pp. 39–61.
Prologue 27
failed because the USA had stood aside, and that American membership of a new
global organization would therefore be crucial in future.
In these groups’ view, human rights should be the pillar of an improved security
system. This notion was expounded most elaborately by the Commission to Study
the Organization of Peace.34 Established in 1939, its leading members had long
been involved in the internationalist networks: Clark M. Eichelberger, Great War
veteran and president of the League of Nations Association; the aforementioned
James Shotwell, history professor at Columbia University; and the lawyers Clyde
Eagleton and Quincy Wright, the latter being a professor at the University of
Chicago and a friend of the late Woodrow Wilson. The group was politically
left of centre, and open to socialist positions. It maintained close contact with
high-level government circles; Shotwell and Eichelberger worked on the State
Department committee that drew up a draft international ‘Bill of Rights’, even
though this project would soon be shelved. Nonetheless, the Commission was
well represented among the advisory staff who accompanied the American dele-
gation to the UN Conference in San Francisco, with over forty of its members
participating.
The Commission’s guiding principle was an international community in which
states would limit their national sovereignty so as to safeguard the freedom of the
individual, social justice, economic progress, and security.35 They saw international
concern for human rights as ‘the heart of realistic measures for wiping out aggres-
sive war’.36 In their analysis, this connection arose in two ways. Firstly they
considered that the dictatorships of the interwar years—presumably mainly
meaning Germany, Italy, and Japan—proved that internal repression and external
aggression were two sides of the same coin; the Second World War had shown that
‘the government that rests upon violence will, by its very nature, be even more
ready to do violence to foreigners than to its own fellow citizens’.37 Secondly, the
Commission saw a strategy of national hostage-taking at work. By setting aside
fundamental rights, members argued, the dictators had been able to cut off their
populations from external influences and incite them to wide-scale fanaticism and
readiness for war.38 Thus, if international mechanisms to protect basic rights could
now be created, it might be possible to prevent totalitarian movements from ever
acquiring such control over their own people. In this sense, the Commission’s case
for international human rights protection was based on the observation that the
essence of modern dictatorship was a radical propensity to violence. The case also
relied on an interpretation of (presumably predominantly) National Socialist policy
34 On the Commission cf. Robert Hillmann, ‘Quincy Wright and the Commission to Study the
Organization of Peace’. In Global Governance 4 (1998), pp. 485–99; Glenn Tatsuya Mitoma, ‘Civil
Society and International Human Rights. The Commission to Study the Organization of Peace and
the Origins of the UN Human Rights Regime’. In HRQ 30 (2008), pp. 607–30; idem, Human Rights
and the Negotiation of American Power (Philadelphia, PA, 2013), pp. 17–43.
35 Cf. Wright, ‘Human Rights’.
36 CSOP, ‘International Safeguard of Human Rights’. In International Conciliation 403 (September
1944), pp. 552–75, here p. 553.
37 Shotwell, Great Decision, p. 195. Also: CSOP, ‘International Safeguard’, p. 573.
38 Wright, Human Rights, p. 249; CSOP, ‘International Safeguard’, pp. 559 et seq.
that attached considerable weight to propagandistic indoctrination, while barely

acknowledging the widespread public support for a policy of conquest. These
understandings pervaded the discourse among internationalist NGOs.39 They
clearly indicate that, for the internationalists, the notion of human rights had first
and foremost to do with questions of security.
The link that internationalists established between human rights and security
was nurtured by the perception that the regions of the world were growing
increasingly interdependent.40 Authors always cited the same material develop-
ments, especially the aeroplane and radio, as innovations in transport and com-
munication technology and, less frequently, increased volumes of international
trade and migration. They argued that given all these phenomena, the continents
were now tightly interconnected, hence contemporary wars would be global in
scale. In retrospect, there is considerable evidence that it was the Second World
War, or possibly the earlier Great Depression, that first sharply outlined the political
drama of a ‘shrinking world’ and prompted observers to explain it by looking back
further into history. In any case, it was evident that the Second World War had
acted as the catalyst for an enormously strengthened global consciousness. This
could clearly be seen in internationalist writings: from observing the world’s
increasing integration, they concluded that nation states’ capacities were under-
mined and that peace was indivisible. Thus, they saw international cooperation
and human rights protection as absolutely necessary for survival.
The thinking of American groups bore a strong resemblance to simultaneous
observations made by European federalists. These were primarily exiled politicians,
most of whom had found their way to Great Britain and the USA, and resistance
activists fighting against German occupation. They favoured a European feder-
ation in which nation states should essentially cede their traditional powers to
international authorities—despite innumerable differences in detail, this was the
great transnational post-war vision in federalist thinking.41 It had been a fringe
view after the First World War, yet its attraction increased enormously from the
39 See, for example, The Commission to Study the Bases of a Just and Durable Peace, Six Pillars of
Peace. A Study Guide (New York, 1943); The American Jewish Committee, To the Counsellors of Peace.
Recommendations of The American Jewish Committee (New York, 1945). American Law Institute,
Report of William Draper Lewis on the Discussion of the International Bill of Rights Project at the Annual
Meeting, May 12, 1943 (Philadelphia, PA, 1943); The International Law of the Future, ‘Postulats,
Principles, Proposals. A Statement of a Community of Views by North Americans’. In International
Conciliation 399 (April 1944), pp. 251–380; World Citizens Association, World’s Destiny and the
United States. A Conference of Experts in International Relations (Chicago, IL, 1941).
40 Cf. Wright, ‘Human Rights’, p. 248; CSOP, ‘Third Report. The United Nations and the
Organization of Peace’. In International Conciliation 389 (April 1943), pp. 203–37, here p. 211;
Charles A. Baylis, ‘Towards an International Bill of Rights’. In The Public Opinion Quarterly 8 (1944),
pp. 244–53, here p. 244; ‘The International Law of the Future: Postulates, Principles, Proposals.
A Statement of a Community of Views by North Americans’. In International Conciliation 399 (April
1944), pp. 251–380, here p. 278; The Commission to Study the Bases of a Just and Durable Peace,
Pillars, p. 5. Cf. Steigerwald, Idealism, p. 53, on the call for a ‘Declaration of Interdependence’.
41 Cf. also Walter Lipgens (ed.), Europa-Föderationspläne der Widerstandsbewegungen 1940–1945.
Eine Dokumentation (henceforth: Europa-Föderationspläne) (Munich, 1968), although the federalist
ideas seem too unified. Most recently see, e.g., Christian Bailey, Between Yesterday and Tomorrow.
German Visions of Europe, 1926–1950 (New York and Oxford, 2013).
Prologue 29
late thirties onwards, given the National Socialist war of conquest and European
states’ obvious helplessness in response to it.42 Federalist opinions crossed ideo-
logical boundaries—they were shared by socialists, liberals, and conservatives
(although not by communists), and by Christians and non-Christians alike.
The idea of internationalized rights also fed into blueprints for a European
federal state, although they were put forward by only a modest number of authors.
Like the American models, these European concepts rested on the perceived
interconnection of European states. A British federalist publication stressed that:
Nowadays it is not only a question of peace among nations or states; internal order
and the liberties of the individual are also directly dependent on the maintenance of
international order.43
And like American efforts, the European quest for the assertion of international
rights was clearly characterized by a paradigm of collective security. The Danubian
Club, an association for Eastern European democratic and socialist politicians in
exile, saw recent experience as
proof that the creation of a dictatorship or a fascist regime in one state represents a
danger to the continued existence of liberty in other states. It is therefore essential to
create safeguards to ensure that all citizens in all member states of the union can enjoy
democratic freedoms.44
The deliberations of exiled politicians and activists represented a vital pivot for
human rights discourse. London became one of its key centres—alongside
New York where, as I will describe, a series of exiles were then working on estab-
lishing the International League for the Rights of Man. A group of internationalist
thinkers gathered in London, many of whom were lawyers and most of whom had
met while working for the League of Nations.45 Some members of this network of
exiles would later be influential in building up the UN human rights system—
particularly René Cassin and Egon Schwelb, as well as Henri Laugier, who lived in
Montreal but liaised with London.46 Much of this remains to be explored, yet
42 For context see Gerhard Brunn, Die europäische Einigung von 1945 bis heute (Stuttgart, 2009);
Wilfried Loth, Der Weg nach Europa. Geschichte der europäischen Integration 1939–1957 (Göttingen,
1990); Gabriele Clemens, Gerhart Reinfeldt, and Alexander Wille, Geschichte der europäischen
Integration. Ein Lehrbuch (Paderborn, 2008); Derek Heater, The Idea of European Unity (New York, 1992).
43 ‘New Commonwealth Quarterly’, October 1941–January 1942. In Documents on the History of
European Integration, Vol. 2, Plans for European Union in Great Britain and in Exile (henceforth:
Documents, Vol. 2), edited by Lipgens and Loth (Berlin and New York, 1986), pp. 286–7, here p. 286.
Similar views were expressed by a series of other authors.
44 Danubian Club, ‘Bericht’, July 1943. In Europa-Föderationspläne, edited by Lipgens, pp. 481–91,
here p. 487 [tr. Ward]. Cf. Thomas Lane and Marian Wolanski, Poland and European Integration. The
Ideas and Movements of Polish Exiles in the West, 1939–91 (Basingstoke, 2009). Similar plans were also
proposed by H. G. Wells. Cf. Wells, The New World Order. Whether It is Attainable, How It Can be
Attained, and What Sort of World a World at Peace Will Have to Be (London, 1940).
45 On the following cf. Jay Winter and Antoine Prost, Cassin and Human Rights. From the Great
War to the Universal Declaration (Cambridge, UK, 2013), esp. pp. 51–79, 134–67, 221–64.
46 Cassin was later a UN human rights commissioner, while as Deputy Secretary General, Laugier
summoned Schwelb and the Montreal lawyer John Humphrey to the UN human rights division. Cf.
Winter and Prost, Cassin.
Cassin’s intellectual career in particular reveals several significant lines of development

in thinking on human rights policy. Injured as a solider in the First World War, he
concerned himself at the League of Nations with creating lasting structures for
peace. Early on, he began to question the principle of national sovereignty, yet after
the outbreak of the Second World War the danger that the world might in future
be dominated by a handful of ‘Leviathan states’ became central to his thinking. On
this basis, he suggested that mechanisms for universal human rights protection
would be necessary to prevent further wars. These political perceptions and pro-
posed solutions put Cassin squarely in line with the American internationalists,
and indeed the French exiles in London were seemingly well informed about the
American debate.
The federalist mindset came strongly to the fore during the Second World War
in a way that is quite remarkable in the history of ideas. It would be no exaggeration
to say that this intellectual movement formulated an unprecedented and radical
rejection of the sovereign nation state, and that this rejection found wider res-
onance than ever before in the modern era—the era that had itself first given rise
to the nation state. Yet it included only sporadic calls to protect human rights on
an international level—which is more than just a negative finding. It should not be
underestimated as evidence of how little traction there was for the idea that it was
necessary to create systematic foundations for protecting citizens against their own
governments and resolutely intervening in a state’s ‘internal affairs’. This emerges
all the more clearly if we consider that a series of federalist thinkers were downright
unwilling to take decisive action to promote human rights and spoke out against a
federal ‘Bill of Rights’.47 They consciously avoided taking steps towards inter-
national legal protection.48 Their objections were set to remain in public awareness
during post-war political debates, and even in retrospect, it seems difficult to reject
out of hand the idea that international protection of rights seemed likely to cause
more problems than it would solve.
A second important historical thread in developing demands for international
human rights guarantees can be found in the deliberations of international Jewish
organizations. They approached the idea of human rights from the Jewish
experience of persecution and disenfranchisement, and for them it had the greatest
value of all. In view of the existential defencelessness of Jews in many countries,
activists seized on human rights as a vital new tool for achieving guaranteed
integration for Jewish minorities within societies where the majority were of
other religions.
47 Cf. Ivor Jennings, ‘A Federation for Western Europe’, 1940. In Documents, Vol. 2, edited by
Lipgens and Loth, pp. 99–102. On the rejection of a binding ‘Bill of Rights’ in the American discus-
sion, see Philip Nash, An Adventure in World Order (Boston, MA, 1944).
48 See also e.g. Carlo Sforza, ‘The Independence and Interdependence of Nations’, October–
December 1943. In Documents, Vol. 2, edited by Lipgens and Loth, pp. 530–3; Study Department of
the World Council of Churches, ‘The Church and International Reconstruction’, January 1943. In
Documents on the History of European Integration, Vol. 4, Transnational Organization of Political Parties
and Pressure Groups in the Struggle for European Union, 1945–1950 (henceforth: Documents, Vol. 4),
edited by Lipgens and Loth (Berlin and New York, 1991), pp. 735–40, esp. p. 739.
Prologue 31
Towards the end of the war, the American Jewish Committee set up a
Committee on Peace Problems, which offered perhaps the sharpest analysis of the
circumstances.49 Its starting point was the perceived weaknesses of the minority
treaties, backed by the League of Nations. These had been concluded with the
recently created nation states of Eastern, Central, and South-Eastern Europe, but
not with Western states. They guaranteed particular political, civil, religious, and
cultural rights to minority groups. The League of Nations could take action in
conflict situations, although minority representatives had no authorization to
petition it directly.50 In the Committee’s eyes, the treaties had failed to offer hard-
pressed minorities enough recourse to appeal, yet at the same time, they evolved
into a constant source of resentment for the governments bound by them. Thus,
the problem with the system, they believed, was that it singled out two groups:
minorities within the state, given special status because the stipulated rights applied
only to them; and the ‘new’ nation states of Eastern-Central Europe, which
considered themselves to have been ignominiously discriminated against by being
required to enter into the agreements while Western European states (including
Germany) were not held to account. The Committee felt that an international
system of legal protection, to apply equally to all states and to all people within
them, offered a way out: ‘For the future, international safeguarding of human
rights seems to be the best hope.’51
It would be misleading to understand the Jewish shift towards human rights as
an attempt to replace collective rights with individual ones.52 The existing minority
treaties mainly guaranteed individual rights (such as freedom of religion or free
access to officialdom), rather than collective rights that a group could access only
as a group.53 Yet they were individual rights that applied only to part of the
population. The new principle that the Jewish organizations had in mind was
therefore to universalize individual rights. To put it pointedly, the Jewish groups
were aiming to use the idea of human rights to make self-preservation more
effective by generalizing it: ‘The best protection for Jews is the security of all
human beings and the enforcement of their fundamental rights.’54 Similarly, recent
experience of the repressive force of totalitarian regimes had changed the thinking
49 Cf. The American Jewish Committee, Counsellors. 50 Cf. Fink, Defending.

51 The American Jewish Committee, Counsellors, p. 20. This change was also intended to dis-
tance them from the Zionist and ethnic-nationalist ideas of other American-Jewish groups. Cf.
James Loeffler, ‘“The Conscience of America”. Human Rights, Jewish Politics, and American
Foreign Policy at the 1945 United Nations San Francisco Conference’. In Journal of American
History 100 (2013), 401–28.
52 Cf. Mazower’s early article: Mark Mazower, ‘Minorities and the League of Nations in Interwar
Europe’. In Daedalus 126 (1997), pp. 47–63.
53 The Jewish groups were aware of this. Cf. Schweizerischer Israelitischer Gemeindebund, Jüdische
Nachkriegsprobleme. Bericht der Kommission für Nachkriegsprobleme des Schweizerischen Israelitischen
Gemeindebundes (Zurich, 1945), p. 25. On the minorities protection system see Carole Fink, ‘The
League of Nations and the Minorities Question’. In World Affairs 157 (1995), pp. 197–205; eadem,
Defending; Martin Scheuermann, Minderheitenschutz contra Konfliktverhütung? Die Minderheitenpolitik
des Völkerbundes in den zwanziger Jahren (Marburg, 2000).
54 The American Jewish Committee, Counsellors, p. 22. The same argument is found in:
Schweizerischer Israelitischer Gemeindebund, Jüdische Nachkriegsprobleme, p. 22.
of international women’s organizations. Instead of arguing for specific women’s

rights, women were now increasingly calling for the protection of individual
rights in general.55 As early as 1936, Margaret Corbett Ashby, president of the
International Woman Suffrage Alliance (IWSA, later renamed the International
Alliance of Women), had warned: ‘we cannot, we dare not be only feminists; we
must be humanists as well in order to preserve in society the very rights in which
we would share.’56 Considerations of this kind would inspire both Jewish and
women’s organizations to call for international human rights provisions at the San
Francisco conference.57 All the same, positions within the Jewish debate were
anything but uniform, especially after the end of the war when it could open up
more broadly. Some o rganizations, such as the World Jewish Council, were abso-
lutely opposed to giving up the system of minority protection and continually
attempted to revive it until 1950, when it was formally disbanded.58 Other
politicians and activists, meanwhile, focused on establishing their own nation state
to ensure that Jews within its borders had complete legal security of a kind
unavailable elsewhere.59
Some of the institutions proposed by the internationalists pre-empted the later
UN human rights system.60 There was almost unanimous support for the idea of a
‘Bill of Rights’ to be adopted by a future international organization.61 Similarly,
the European federalists called for a federal charter of rights that would yoke
together all the member states in a common foundational consensus.62 The most
55 Cf. Offen, Feminisms, esp. pp. 341–77; eadem, ‘Women’s Rights or Human Rights? International
Feminism between the Wars’. In Women’s Rights and Human Rights. International Historical Perspectives,
edited by Patricia Grimshaw et al. (Basingstoke, 2001), pp. 243–53; Marilyn Lake, ‘From Self-
Determination via Protection to Equality via Non-Discrimination: Defining Women’s Rights at the
League of Nations and the United Nations’. In Women’s Rights and Human Rights, edited by Grimshaw
et al., pp. 254–71. I consider the counter-argument to Offen less plausible. Cf. Susanne Hertrampf,
‘Zum Wohle der Menschheit’. Feministisches Denken und Engagement internationaler Aktivistinnen
1945–1975 (Herbolzheim, 2006), p. 94.
56 Quoted by Offen, ‘Women’s Rights’, p. 248. Similar to the declaration by WILPF at the Zurich
Congress of 1934, reproduced in WILPF 1915–1938. A Venture in Internationalism (Genf, 1938),
p. 27. On the context see: Catherine Foster, Women for All Seasons. The Story of the Women’s International
League for Peace and Freedom (Athens and London, 1989); Reinalda and Verhaaren, Vrouwenbeweging.
57 Cf., e.g., World Jewish Congress, Information Bulletin (New York, 1945), No. 3, March 1945, p. 1.
58 See the recent nuanced study by Nathaniel Kurz, A Sphere above the Nations? The Rise and Fall of
International Jewish Human Rights Politics, Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University (2015), esp. ch. 1.
59 Cf. Atina Grossman, ‘Who Guarantees Individual Rights? Jews and Human Rights Debates
after World War II’. In Order, edited by Frei and Weinke, pp. 42–52.
60 For more on the following see: CSOP, ‘Third Report’; idem, ‘Fourth Report’; Universities
Committee on Post-War International Problems, ‘Summaries of Reports of Cooperating Groups’.
In International Conciliation 405 (Nov. 1944), pp. 667–722; Baylis, ‘International Bill’; ‘National
Study Conference on the Churches and a Just and Durable Peace, Jan. 16–19, 1945, Convened by
the Commission on a Just and Durable Peace’. In International Conciliation 409 (March 1945),
pp. 142–77.
61 Cf. e.g. the six-point Bill of Rights signed by 1,300 key figures, reproduced in ‘Leaders in US
Ask World Rights Bill’, New York Times, 15 December 1944, p. 10 and CSOP, Draft International Bill
of Human Rights (New York, 1947).
62 Cf. Jules Romains, ‘France’s Mission or Abdication’, lecture delivered May 1942. In Documents,
Vol. 2, edited by Lipgens and Loth, p. 290; Mario Alberto Rollier, ‘Draft Constitution of a European
Federal Union’. In Documents, Vol. 1, edited by Lipgens and Loth, pp. 528–34; International Peace
Campaign, ‘Guidelines’.
Prologue 33
detailed legal document of this kind that had been developed by the end of the war
was put forward by Hersch Lauterpacht.63 His Bill of Rights was primarily intended
to safeguard political and civil rights such as freedom of opinion and the right
to political participation, in keeping with the predominant view among the
internationalists. However, internationalists also frequently discussed welfare
provisions, often with reference to Roosevelt’s idea of ‘freedom from want’; they
were also, if less frequently, inspired by the British Beveridge Report. Some groups
even adopted social rights into their catalogue of human rights, particularly the
rights to work, to social security, and to education.64 Another noteworthy aspect
of Lauterpacht’s thinking was that he proposed a permanent human rights com-
mission and an individual right of petition to breathe life into his Bill, as did the
Commission to Study the Organization of Peace.65 Here, they went much further
than others in devising powerful institutions. The organizations grappling with
human rights had an entirely realistic appreciation of the difficulties in the way of
implementing their ideas. It was more common for the planned charter of
rights to be seen as a minimum than as a maximum set of standards, and the
internationalists openly admitted that it would initially be nothing more than ‘a
pious expression of noble sentiments’.66 Many showed impressive perspicacity in
anticipating the functional problems that would arise in the later UN human
rights system.67 In this spirit, most of the internationalists were hoping that more
could be achieved with a deficient system than with no system at all.
In terms of ideas and political conceptions, the narrower origins of international
human rights policy in the forties can be traced to reflection on the dangers of war
and the persecution of defenceless minorities. Meanwhile, the increasing circula-
tion of the term ‘human rights’ during wartime also flowed from experience of
totalitarian states. For many contemporary observers, looking on as (mostly) fascist
regimes curtailed freedoms and operated with utter disdain for human dignity
63 Cf. Lauterpacht, International Bill. On Lauterpacht cf. Koskenniemi, Civilizer, pp. 353–412;
Elihu Lauterpacht, The Life of Sir Hersch Lauterpacht, QC, FBA, LLD (Cambridge, UK, 2010), here
esp. pp. 251–64.
64 See also CSOP, ‘Second Report—The Transitional Period’. In International Conciliation 379
(April 1942), pp. 147–69; idem, ‘Third Report’, pp. 203–37; idem, Draft International Bill of Human
Rights (New York, 1947); The American Law Institute, Report to the Council; Catholic Association for
International Peace, America’s Peace Aims. A Committee Report (New York, no date), pp. 23 et seq.;
World Citizens Association, World’s Destiny.
65 Cf. Lauterpacht, International Bill, pp. 69–82, 169–224. Federalists sometimes demanded
either options for intervention should a state infringe the rights of its citizens, or oversight from a
supreme court, even though all these mechanisms were vaguely defined. Cf. Danubian Club, Bericht;
Europa-Union, Draft Constitution of United States of Europe (1942). In Documents, Vol. 1, edited by
Lipgens and Loth, pp. 770–9; Andrea Caffi, ‘Socialists, January 1941’. In Documents, Vol. 1, edited
by Lipgens and Loth, pp. 499–501; Sigfrido Ciccotti, ‘For a Constructive Militant Democracy’, 1944.
In Documents, Vol. 2, edited by Lipgens and Loth (Berlin and New York, 1986), pp. 545–7;
International Group of Socialists at the Rand School in New York, ‘Our War and Peace Aims’, July
1941. In Documents, Vol. 2, edited by Lipgens and Loth, pp. 663–5; International Group of
Democratic Socialists in Stockholm, ‘Peace Aims of Democratic Socialists’, March 1943. In Documents,
Vol. 2, edited by Lipgens and Loth, pp. 677–80; Walter Layton, ‘European Unity’, March 1944. In
Documents, Vol. 2, edited by Lipgens and Loth, pp. 250–4.
66 The American Jewish Committee, Counsellors, p. 22.
67 Cf. Wright, International Rights; Lauterpacht, International Bill, pp. 7–9.
dramatically increased their appreciation for the pre-constitutional individual

rights. Thus, from the very beginning, there was a strong anti-totalitarian element
inherent in recourse to human rights, which aimed to restore the individual vis-
à-vis the state. This was also key to explaining the strong emphasis placed on
political and civil rights in particular. It was predominantly, but not exclusively,
conservative and Catholic groups that picked up on and articulated this refram-
ing. Human rights discourse became an important medium for their intellec-
tual reorientation, as they adapted their anti-liberal, anti-enlightenment, and
anti-communist modes of thought to the new realities—preserving important
parts of their earlier convictions in this reshaped form. Those plans that grew out
of the totalitarian e xperience—unlike those of the internationalists—did not
generally aim to set up international agreements or institutions. Rather, they
anticipated and fed into the constitutional discourse of the post-war years, which
focused on possible ways of redefining the state under the rule of law.
This is shown firstly by discussions among European resistance groups. In these
circles, experience of an excessively overreaching notion of the state under German
occupation had given rise to a vigorous renaissance in ideas of liberty and the rights
of individuals. At the same time, this was an important inspiration for conservative
resistance groups in Germany. For Adam von Trott zu Solz, the basic objective of
resistance was the ‘restoration of the inalienable, divine and natural right of the
human person’, which he considered to be under equal threat from National
Socialism and ‘Bolshevism’.68 As this quotation reveals, authors made use of vary-
ing terms without establishing clear distinctions between them. They spoke not
only of ‘dignity’ and ‘natural right’ but also of ‘the right of the individual’ and
sometimes of ‘human right’.69 The individual rights demanded in these statements
were, however, exclusively conceived in terms of national, constitutional rights.
The authors were concerned with restoring the rule of law and the constitutional
protection destroyed by the National Socialists. They did not make the break-
through to call for internationalized legal protection.70
Discussions in the Vatican and European Catholicism pointed in a similar
direction, albeit from a different starting point.71 The war years saw the culmin-
ation of a process in which notions of personal rights, human dignity, and human
rights, while not built up to form a systematic Christian doctrine, served now and
then as a potent symbolic argument. This development was fed by a complex
68 Adam von Trott zu Solz, ‘Denkschrift’, April 1942. In Europa-Föderationspläne, edited by

Lipgens, pp. 125–8. See also Kreisauer Kreis, ‘Grundsätze für die Neuordnung’, 9 August 1943. In
Bewegt von der Hoffnung aller Deutschen. Zur Geschichte des Grundgesetzes. Entwürfe und Diskussionen
1941–1949, edited by Wolfgang Benz (Munich, 1979), pp. 94–103, here p. 95.
69 For the counter-position see Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Willem Adolf Visser ’t Hooft, ‘Denkschrift’,
September 1941. In Europa-Föderationspläne, edited by Lipgens, pp. 121–3.
70 See also Carl Friedrich Goerdeler, ‘Friedensplan’, Autumn 1943. In Europa-Föderationspläne,
edited by Lipgens, pp. 155–8, here pp. 157–8. On France, see, e.g.: ‘Program of the Conseil National
de la Résistance’, 15 March 1944. In The Resistance versus Vichy. The Purge of Collaborators in Liberated
France, edited by Peter Novick (New York, 1968), pp. 198–201; and de Gaulle, Discours et messages,
Vol. 1, Pendant la guerre: juin 1940–janvier 1946 (Paris, 1970).
71 For discussion of the role of Protestant groups, cf. H-Diplo Roundtable XVII, 20 on Christian
Human Rights (11 April 2016), https://networks.h-net.org/node/28443/discussions/119444/
h-diplo-roundtable-xvii-20-christian-human-rights-11-april-2016.
Prologue 35
interaction between the experiences of national Catholic Churches under the

dictatorships, diplomatic efforts on the part of the Holy See, and the process of
doctrinal clarification promoted by the Vatican. The Catholic Church’s embracing
of human rights was framed by its engagement with the new totalitarian regimes
from the 1920s onwards.72 The Vatican’s uncompromising opposition to
Communism was diplomatically sealed in 1927, when Pius XI finally broke off the
attempt to enter into negotiations with the Soviet government. After the early
thirties, the Vatican promoted a concerted diplomatic campaign aimed at isolating
the Soviet Union internationally and portraying Communism as the primary
threat to the Catholic order.73 The frontlines in relation to the fascist regimes
clarified more slowly, especially as the Vatican was thoroughly sympathetic to
many of their social and p olitical models, particularly those that Mussolini
attempted to implement in Italy. By the early 1930s, however, it had become clear
that if things came to a head, the fascist rulers would ruthlessly press home their
advantage over the Church; the National Socialist government had always unscru-
pulously flouted the Concordat agreed in 1933. In these circumstances, by 1934
there were calls from within the Holy Office for a public denouncement of the
‘three modern heresies’—i.e. radical nationalism, racism, and totalitarianism.74
These considerations resulted in three encyclicals published by Pius XI in 1937,
although not until after they had gone through a complicated drafting process.
A Syllabus of Errors, directed against the National Socialist and Italian Fascist
regimes, was drawn up first; it branded them both as the epitome of ‘totalitari-
ansm’ and the chief danger to ‘individual rights’. Under the influence of Eugenio
Pacelli, this document was then rejected and the charge of rights violations was
ultimately levelled predominantly against communism, in line with the Vatican’s
primarily anti-Soviet tendency that dated from the early thirties.75 In fact, the
encyclical ‘Divini Redemptoris’ contained a longer list of rights that the communist
rulers were accused of ignoring.76 It featured considerably sharper condemna-
tion of this variant of totalitarianism than the remarks made in the encyclical
72 On the following see: Thomas Brechenmacher, ‘Die Enzyklika “Mit brennender Sorge” als
Höhe- und Wendepunkt der päpstlichen Politik gegenüber dem nationalsozialistischen Deutschland’.
In Die Herausforderung der Diktaturen. Katholizismus in Deutschland und Italien 1918–1943/45,
edited by Wolfram Pyta et al. (Tübingen, 2009), pp. 271–300; Konrad Repgen, ‘Außenpolitik der
Päpste im Zeitalter der Weltkriege’. In Handbuch der Kirchengeschichte, Vol. 7, Die Weltkirche im 20.
Jahrhundert, edited by Hubert Jedin and Konrad Repgen (Freiburg, 1985), pp. 36–96; Christian
Kösters, ‘Christliche Kirchen und nationalsozialistische Diktatur’. In Das ‘Dritte Reich’. Eine
Einführung, edited by Dietmar Süß and Winfried Süß (Munich, 2008), pp. 121–41; Martin Conway,
Catholic Politics in Europe, 1918–1945 (London, 1997), pp. 47–96.
73 Cf. Giuliana Chamedes, The Vatican and the Making of the Atlantic Order, Ph.D. dissertation,
Columbia University, New York (2013).
74 Cf. Brechenmacher, ‘Der Heilige Stuhl und die europäischen Mächte im Vorfeld und während
des Zweiten Weltkriegs’. In Kirchen im Krieg. Europa 1939–1945, edited by Hummel and Kösters
(Paderborn, 2007), pp. 25–46; idem, ‘Enzyklika’; Besier, Der Heilige Stuhl.
75 For more on this now see: Chamedes, Vatican.
76 Cf. Encyclical ‘Divini Redemptoris’, 19 March 1937, http://w2.vatican.va/content/pius-xi/it/
encyclicals/documents/hf_pius-xi_enc_19370319_divini-redemptoris.html, paras 10–11. See also
Sollemnia jubilaria of 1938, cited in Xavier de Montclos, ‘Le discours de Pie sur la défense des droits
de la personne humaine’. In Actes du colloque organisé par l’École française de Rome (henceforth: Actes),
edited by Achille Ratti, Pape Pie XI (Rome, 1996), pp. 857–72, here p. 859.
‘Mit brennender Sorge’ [With Deep Anxiety], addressed to the German bishops
(the third encyclical, ‘Firmissimam constantiam’, opposed religious persecutions in
Mexico).77 Nonetheless, in ‘Mit brennender Sorge’, the Pope stated that:
Whoever exalts race, or the people, or the State, or a particular form of State, or the
depositories of power, or any other fundamental value of the human community . . . to
an idolatrous level . . . perverts an order of the world planned and created by God.
He also emphasized ‘the basic fact that man as a person possesses rights he holds
from God, and which any collectivity must protect against denial, suppression or
neglect’.78 In all this, while Pius XI drew on elements of his discourse since the
twenties, it was only now that he developed references to rights and the ‘dignity of
the human person’ into a substantial argument.79 Thus human rights gained
justification in the confrontation with totalitarian regimes, although in unequal
measure, and a new, vital importance as a line of defence that they had not previously
enjoyed in ecclesiastical disputes with state powers.
Under Pius XI’s successor, such concepts of rights gained even greater significance.
Eugenio Pacelli, who officiated as Pope Pius XII from 1939 onwards, had pre-
viously served as Cardinal Secretary of State, where he had played a leading role in
shaping Vatican diplomacy. He now repeatedly denounced as unchristian the
totalitarian celebration of the autotelic state.80 In his Christmas message of 1942,
Pius XII described the ‘Dignity of the Human Person’ as the first of his Five Points
for Ordering Society. Moreover, he specified a series of material rights, which
included rights to life, religious education, religious practice, marriage, and work,
as well as the right to freely choose one’s state of life, and the right to use material
goods.81 This was coupled with a new commitment to democracy, which signalled
no small shift in rhetoric. In this way, the Pope pushed for ‘Christian democracy’,
which would be best suited to guarantee protection against the totalitarian viola-
tion of the human ‘person’, although this idea hid less than pluralistic and par-
ticipatory views, being instead anti-liberal, elitist, and characterized by Catholic
moral principles.82
As Samuel Moyn points out, the papal commitment to the human ‘person’
formed part of a broader ideological reorientation that emerged in the thinking of
Catholic intellectuals and clergy during the interwar and war years. It would later
become one of the mainstays of renewed, post-war Christian democracy.83 It was
77 Brechenmacher, ‘Enzyklika’, p. 284.

78 Encyclical ‘Mit brennender Sorge’, paras 12 and 35 [tr.: https://w2.vatican.va/content/pius-xi/
de/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-xi_enc_14031937_mit-brennender-sorge.html].
79 Cf. Thomas Williams, Who is my Neighbor? Personalism and the Foundation of Human Rights
(Washington, DC, 2005); Montclos, Discours de Pie.
80 Cf., e.g., Pius XII, ‘Radioansprache’, 1 June 1941. In Philippe de la Chapelle, La déclaration univer-
selle des droits de l’homme et le catholicisme (Paris, 1967), pp. 17 et seq., p. 17, note 20; idem, ‘Radiomessage
du pape Pie XII’, 1 September 1944. In Actes, Vol. 11, edited by Blet et al., pp. 522–8, here p. 524.
81 Pius XII, ‘Radiomessage de Noel du pape Pie XII’, 24 December 1942. In Actes, Vol. 7, edited
by Blet et al., pp. 161–7 [tr.:https://www.ewtn.com/library/PAPALDOC/P12CH42.HTM].
82 Cf. Chamedes, Vatican.
83 Cf. Samuel Moyn, ‘Personalism, Community, and the Origins of Human Rights’. In Human
Rights in the Twentieth Century, edited by Hoffmann (Cambridge, UK, 2010), pp. 85–106; and esp.
idem, Christian Human Rights (Philadelphia, PA, 2015).
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happiness. Have I guessed rightly; and will you forgive me, and let me
make my congratulations too?”
Nelly looked up, blushing and bright and sorry, and very much tempted
to cry. “Oh, Mr. Vane, I can’t bear it,” she said.
“What, not the happiness? I could bear a great deal of it if it ever came
my way.”
“Has it never come your way?” said Nelly, looking at him wistfully. “But
I did not mean—the happiness. I have always been very happy. It is the
family assembly, and the talk, and the congratulations. If you don’t know,
you can’t think how they hurt, how they——”
“Take the bloom off?”
“I suppose that is it,” said Nelly, with a soft little sigh.
Vane, who had a great deal more experience than she gave him credit for,
looked past her at her lover, and concluded, on perfectly insufficient
grounds, that Molyneux was not worthy of Nelly. The ladies of Ernest’s
family were not only convinced of the fact that Nelly was quite unworthy of
him, but that Frederick also was really misplaced in such a family. Why
such ideas should be so readily entertained by the different halves of
humanity, I cannot tell. It was something in Nelly’s tone and something in
the cut of Ernest’s nose which decided Mr. Vane.
“And would it be impertinent of a stranger, who is a connexion, to ask if
it is all settled,” he said, “and when it is to be?”
“Nothing is settled,” said Nelly, with a deeper blush than ever; and after
a pause she turned to him with a despairing simplicity, which he did not
quite understand. “Mr. Vane,” she said, “I should like to ask you something.
You say it has never come your way. Yet you look as if one might ask you
things. Do you think that people, relations, those who have been each
other’s dearest friends—or more than friends—I mean,” said Nelly, “one’s
father or mother even—do you think they change to you, when your
interests are in opposition to theirs?”
“One’s father or mother?” said Vane, trying to follow her thought; “but
that must be so rare a case, Miss Eastwood.”
“You think so too?” said Nelly brightly, recovering herself in a moment.
“That is my opinion; but they tell me I know nothing of the world. How can
one’s interests be in opposition to those of one’s own people? Since ever I
have known anything, I have been taught the contrary. I am so glad you
think as I do.”
“But stop a little,” said Vane, “perhaps we are going too far. Suppose we
were to take an instance. Regan and Goneril felt their interests to be in
opposition to their father’s, and it did make a great change in them. If we
were to ask more than we ought from our nearest relation, it would wound
his sense of justice and his trust in us; even love might be impaired. I have
known men who threw themselves upon their friends to save them from
ruin, real or supposed, and to whom there was no change of feeling. And I
have known others who made demands upon the same friends for no greater
sacrifice, to whom it was given with a sore heart and a deep sense of injury.
All the difference depends upon the circumstances.”
Nelly grew wistful again; she was not satisfied. “Tell me this, then,” she
said in a low voice, which he had to stoop to hear. “Is it natural that we
should be always trying how much we can get, and they how little they can
give?”
“Any one who told you so,” said Vane indignantly, “must have the
lowest and meanest conception”—then he caught Nelly’s eye with a
mingled look of fright and entreaty in it, which at the moment he could
make nothing of, but which touched some instinct in his mind more capable
of action than reason, and compelled him to change his tone. “I mean,” he
said, with a forced laugh, “that this is the conventional way in which we
speak in society, which sounds terrible but means nothing. It is the
fashionable cynical view, which we all pretend to take to hide the real
feeling, which it is not English to show. How didactic you have made me,
Miss Eastwood, and what a serious strain we have drifted into! I am afraid
you will never sit next to me again.”
“Indeed, I will, and like it,” said honest Nelly, smiling at him with her
heart in her eyes. It seemed to Nelly that here was a sort of big brother,
kinder than Frederick, wiser than Dick, who had suddenly come to her aid
to disentangle for her that ravelled skein which had troubled her mind so
much. She turned round to Ernest forthwith, and whispered something to
him with a sweet compunction, to make up for the injustice she had done
him in her heart. Mr. Vane, I am sorry to say, was not moved with like
sentiments. He gave a short, audible breath of impatience through his
nostrils, which he ought not to have done, and glanced at young Molyneux
over Nelly’s head, and said to himself, “Confound the fellow!” I have
observed that, towards a young man in Ernest’s position, this is a common
sentiment—with men.
Innocent was on her cousin’s other side. Mrs. Eastwood had hesitated
much about this, feeling that at sixteen, and with no education, the girl
ought not perhaps to be allowed to assist at a dinner party. But Mr. Vane’s
presence and the family character of the whole ceremony decided her. It
was a very poor pleasure to Innocent. She was dressed in a black tulle dress,
like nothing she had ever worn before, and which seemed to transmogrify
her and turn her into some one else. Nelly had made a valiant effort to put
up her hair, and give her something of the aspect of a young lady of the
period, but this even Mrs. Eastwood had resisted, saying wisely, that if
Innocent appeared with her hair hanging on her shoulders, as she always
wore it, it would be presumed at once that she was “still in the schoolroom”
(poor Innocent, who had never been in the schoolroom in her life!), a girl
not yet “out.” She answered only “Yes” or “No” to the questions Vane put
to her, and would have stolen away from the drawing-room afterwards
altogether if she had not been detained by something like force. The great
Mrs. Molyneux took condescending notice of her, and plied her with a great
many questions, all actuated by an idea of which no one in the family had
the smallest conception. “I don’t doubt they neglect her shamefully,” she
said to her daughter, after she had ascertained that Innocent neither played,
nor sang, nor drew; that she had never been to school, nor had a governess,
nor masters, and that, in short, she knew nothing.
I am quite unable to tell why this discovery should have given pleasure
to Ernest’s mother, but it did so, and was remembered and made use of
afterwards in most unthought-of ways. But Innocent interested more people
than Mrs. Molyneux. When Sir Alexis came into the drawing-room after
dinner, he requested to be presented to the young stranger. “I think I knew
her father,” he said, and he went and sat by her, and did his best to call forth
some response. “Since he cannot have the one, he is going to try for the
other,” said Mrs. Barclay in Mrs. Eastwood’s ear. But whatever his
intentions or desires might be, he did not make much of Innocent, who was
frozen back into her old stupefied dulness by the many strange faces and
fresh appeals made to her. “You remember your father?” said Sir Alexis,
meaning to move her. “Oh, yes,” said Innocent, but took little further
interest in hearing about him. Perhaps, had it been Niccolo, he might have
moved her more.
“Has she all her faculties?” he asked, hesitating, of Nelly.
“Oh, yes, I think so. She has never been taught anything. She has not got
over her strangeness yet, and she does not care for any of us,” said Nelly,
“except perhaps——”
Here she paused, not venturing to add the name that came to her lips.
Young Molyneux laughed, and took up the words.
“Except, perhaps—yourself, do you mean? You made a wonderful
picture once of the cousin whom you expected; how she was to be the most
beautiful, clever, learned, accomplished of women, to throw everybody else
into the shade; and how, in self-defence, you would have to be cruel to her,
to banish her to the schoolroom——”
“That has come true,” said Nelly, smiling, “but it is the only thing. She is
not Aurora Leigh.”
“She has a beautiful face,” said Sir Alexis. They all looked at the girl
when he said so, for her beauty was not of a kind which struck every
beholder at the first glance. She was sitting quite by herself, in the corner
which she preferred, with her hands crossed upon her lap, and her head half
turned, following Frederick with an undivided gaze. She was not conscious
of any observation. She had eyes but for him alone.
CHAPTER XXII.
ABOUT ANOTHER MARRIAGE.

Frederick was in so strangely disturbed a state of mind that this evening’s
entertainment—as well as all the other incidents of these hurrying days,
which seemed years as they passed, yet appeared to have raced by him
helter-skelter as soon as they were gone—was to him as a dream. He did
not seem to know what he was about. Whatever he did was done
mechanically. He declined all engagements, never went to his club, went
home of nights, and shut himself up in the library or his own room,
smoking a greater number of cigars than he had ever done in his life before,
and thinking of her. Tobacco may be said to be the food of love to the
modern man, as it is the food of musing minds, and intellectual work or
idleness. Frederick lighted one after another mechanically, and brooded
over the image of Amanda. He thought of her in every aspect under which
he had seen her. He recalled to his mind, in detail, the times when they had
met, and everything that had been said and done. And there came upon him
a hunger for her presence which he could not overcome, and scarcely
restrain. She was not an interesting or amusing companion in any
intellectual way. Her talk was the merest chit-chat. The amusements and
occupations she preferred were not of an elevated character; she ignored or
was bored by everything serious; she was uneducated, sometimes almost
vulgar. But all this made no difference, though he was sensible of it. He
made, indeed, occasional efforts to throw off the spell that bound him; to
try, if not to forget her, at least to consider all the obstacles that stood
between them. Their condition of life was entirely different, and to this
Frederick was deeply sensitive. He had trembled to have Batty find him out
at his club, or visit him at his office. He had accepted the man’s invitation in
haste to get rid of him, that no one might see the kind of person who
claimed his acquaintance; and, good heavens! if that very man became his
father-in-law! Then Frederick acknowledged to himself that Amanda would
be “pulled to pieces by the women.” Men might admire her only too much;
but, notwithstanding Frederick’s contempt for women, he felt the deepest
angry humiliation at the thought that only men probably would approve of
his wife—if she should become his wife. Then he had no means to gratify
this sudden passion. He had been very lucky at the office, making his way
by a series of deaths and misfortunes to a position which he could scarcely
have hoped to hold for five or six years longer. Three or four hundred a
year, however, though much for a public office, is not much to set up house
upon, according to Frederick Eastwood’s ideas. He had, like Nelly, five
thousand pounds, but what was that? he said to himself, having the exalted
notions peculiar to the young men of the period. For a young man, living at
home in a handsome house, which cost him nothing, and where he could
entertain his friends when need was, this was very comfortable; but if he
married, and had to keep up an establishment of his own, things would
appear in a very different light. The marriage he ought to have made was
with some one at least as rich as himself; he ought to have done as his
father had done, whose wife had more than doubled his income. All this
Frederick was deeply, sadly aware of. He knew that he ought to do exactly
the reverse of what he wanted to do; he knew that at the very least he ought
to pause and consider carefully all the penalties, all the misery involved.
But in the very midst of his wisest thoughts a sudden recollection would
sweep away every scrap of good sense he possessed, as well as all that
paramount regard for self which had carried him over so many hidden rocks
and dangers of which he alone knew. Perhaps it would be wrong to say that
love had triumphed over self in this struggle. It was a victory more subtle
still—it was the triumph of the self of passion over the self of prudence and
worldly well-being. It was gratification as against profit—delight against
honour. I may, perhaps, judge him harshly, for this class of sentiment is one,
I am aware, in which women are apt to show a want of understanding; but
the reader will decide in how far the credit of a generous passion, scorning
consequences, may be attributed to Frederick Eastwood. I do not call this
kind of frenzy love; but there are many that do. Of the true being called
Amanda Batty he knew next to nothing, and what he did know would, had
he been in his sober senses, have revolted his good taste, and disgusted all
his finer perceptions. Even now he had a vague prevision that he would be
bitterly ashamed of her, did she belong to him; and a certainty that he would
be more than ashamed of her belongings, whom already he loathed; but the
outside of her filled him with a hungry worship, which overcame his reason
and all the sane portion of his mind. After he had forced himself to think
over all the disadvantages, to represent to himself the descent into another
sphere, the want of means, the horrible neighbourhood into which he would
be thrown, there would suddenly gleam upon his mind that turn of her soft
round shoulder when she flung away from him in disdain; the dimples in it,
the velvet texture, the snowy whiteness just touched with tints of rose—and
all his wiser self was at once trampled underfoot. Yet he stood out bravely,
fighting with himself after the same fashion but more strenuously than he
had done on other occasions, when not a lawful love, but a wild, lawless
desire for pleasure, possessed him. Never before had he made so long or so
hard a stand. In the other cases not much had been in question—a bout of
dissipation might carry with it a good many headaches, an empty purse,
and, if found out, a slur upon that spotless character which it was
Frederick’s pride to maintain; but it could do no more; whereas this would
compromise his life. Would it compromise his life? Might it not turn out for
the best, as the other event did which had seemed to envelope him in ruin?
Could not he cut the Batty connexion altogether—make a condition that she
was to be entirely handed over to him, and never inquired about more? And
must not his own innate refinement, his constant companionship, reform the
beautiful creature herself into all that could be desired? This flattering
unction sometimes Frederick succeeded in laying to his soul; but to do him
justice he much more generally perceived and acknowledged to their full
extent the obstacles in his way, and made his fight honestly, knowing what
it was he was fighting against.
Things, however, came to a crisis before very long. He did not himself
know how long the struggle lasted; it absorbed him at last out of almost all
consciousness of what was going on round him. He kept his usual place, got
through, somehow, his usual work, ate and drank, and answered when he
was spoken to, and knew nothing about it. During this period perhaps
Innocent was the greatest comfort he had. The spring had come with a
bound in the beginning of April, after a long stretch of cold weather, and
when after dinner he strayed out of doors to wander under the elms, and
carry on his eternal self-conflict, it was rather soothing to him than
otherwise when his cousin came stealing to his side in the soft twilight.
Poor child! how fond she was of him! it was pleasant to have her there. She
put her hand softly within his arm, and held his sleeve, and turned with him
when he turned, as long as he liked, or at least until his mother’s sharp
summons startled them both, and called in the unwilling girl.
“Why can’t they let her alone when she is happy?” he said to himself on
such occasions. “Women are so spiteful.”
But when Mrs. Eastwood was otherwise engaged, or forgot, or got tired,
as people will do, of constant interference, Innocent would stay with him as
long as he pleased, saying scarcely anything—content only to be with him
—making no demands on his attention. Sometimes she would lean her
cheek softly against his arm, or clasp her hands upon it, with a touching,
silent demonstration of her dependence.
“I am afraid they are not very kind to you,” he would say, bending over
her, in intervals when he had roused himself from more serious thought.
But Innocent made no accusation; she said, “I like you best,” leaning
upon him. Her mind was absolutely as her name. She thought of nothing
better or higher in life than thus to be allowed to wander about with
Frederick, doing whatever he might want of her, accepting his guidance
with implicit faith. He had been the first to take possession of her forlorn
and half-stupefied mind, and no one else had room as yet to enter in.
This, as may be supposed, made Mrs. Eastwood very seriously uneasy,
and produced remonstrances to which Frederick in his pre-occupied
condition paid not the slightest attention.
One evening, however, when he had come to the very verge of the crisis,
she went out in the twilight, and took her son’s arm.
“If you must have a companion, Frederick,” she said, attempting a laugh,
“I am the safest. You cannot turn my head, or have your own turned. I wish
you would pay a little attention to what I say to you.”
“Mother,” he said breathlessly, finding himself forced at last into the
resolution he had so long kept at arm’s length; “for the moment it is you
who must listen to me.”
She was startled by the vehemence of his tone; but kept her composure.
“Surely,” she said, “I am always ready—when you have any thing to say to
me, my dear.”
“I have something to say—and yet nothing—nothing particular,” he
cried. “The fact is that circumstances—have made me think lately—of the
possibility—of marrying——”
He brought out the last words with something of a jerk.
“Of—marrying! You, Frederick?”
“Yes, I. Why not? There is no reason, that I know of, why I should not
marry. There are Nelly and Molyneux setting me the example. She is a great
deal younger than I am, and he has nothing. I do not know what there
should be to prevent me——”
“Nothing, my dear,” said Mrs. Eastwood softly; “but before such an idea
enters into a young man’s head there are generally preliminaries. You intend
to marry somebody in particular? not just the first that comes in your way?”
“You mean that I should have determined upon the person before I
suggest the event?” said Frederick. “One does naturally, I suppose; but let
us imagine that to be done, and there still remains a great deal to do.”
“Is this all you can tell me, Frederick?” said his mother, aghast.
“Well, perhaps it is not all. It is all I have any right to tell you, for I have
taken no decisive steps. You must be aware, mother, that before I do so I
must ascertain what your intentions are—what you are willing to do for me.
I can’t live with a wife and an establishment upon what I have. You would
not like, I presume, to see your son in a back street, with a maid-of-all-
work, living upon next to nothing.”
“Frederick, you have never given me any reason to suppose that you
were thinking of this; you have taken me by surprise. I cannot tell you all in
a moment without any warning, without the least indication—Frederick, for
heaven’s sake,” cried Mrs. Eastwood, struck by sudden terror, “tell me who
is the lady! do not keep me in this suspense. You cannot surely mean——”
She was about to say Innocent; but with natural delicacy she paused,
looking anxiously at him.
“I don’t mean anybody that you have seen,” he said impatiently. “What
is the use of going into particulars? If I told you her name a hundred times
over you would be none the wiser.”
“I am the wiser already. I am relieved of one fear,” said Mrs. Eastwood;
“but, Frederick, more than ever, if this is the case, you ought to be careful
about that poor child. How can you tell what fancies you are putting into
her head? You have made me most anxious, both on your account and
hers.”
“Pshaw! Mother, I wish you would put away those womanish notions of
yours, and for once understand what a man is thinking of when he has a
serious object in hand. Dismiss all this nonsense about that baby Innocent.
If she is a little fool, is it my fault?”
“If I was in your position, Frederick, I should feel it to be serious, and
very much my fault.”
“Good heavens! this is how you treat a man when he wants to talk to you
seriously. Will you pay a little attention to me for once without dragging in
somebody else?”
“I have paid too much attention to you one time and another,” said Mrs.
Eastwood; “and unless you can speak to your mother, Frederick, with
proper respect——”
“Oh dear, yes, certainly, as much as you like,” he cried. “I don’t suppose
you want me to say honoured madam, or go down on my knees for your
blessing.”
There was a moment of silence, during which the fumes of this little
quarrel dissipated themselves. He did not want to quarrel—it was contrary
to his interests. And neither did she.
“We need not make a fuss about it,” he said, in a subdued tone. “It is
natural enough. I shall be seven-and-twenty presently, which is not so
unripe an age. I have got on well enough hitherto living at home, though I
have never had a penny to spare, and I daresay there are a few debts here
and there to look up; but, of course, if I married, the thing would be simply
impossible. We could not come and live with you here, even if we wished
it, and unless you could make a tolerable allowance, of course it is useless
for me to think of such a thing.”
“A tolerable allowance! Frederick, that is what Mr. Molyneux is asking
for Nelly.”
“I’d see him at Jericho first,” said Frederick; “a miserly old villain, who
has money enough to set up a dozen sons. Why should he come to you? I
need not point out to you, mother, the very great difference there is between
Nelly, who is only your daughter, and myself, the eldest son.”
“Has the lady anything?” asked Mrs. Eastwood, skilfully making a
diversion. “I hope she is very nice, my dear, and very good, both for your
sake and my own; and I would not for the world have you mercenary in
your marriage; but still I should like to know—has she anything? I take it
for granted she has nice connexions, and every thing else satisfactory.”
“I don’t know anything about her means,” said Frederick, in a lordly and
splendid way. “That is a question I never thought of asking. She may be
richer than I am, though that is not saying much, or she may not have a
penny. I cannot tell you. That is the last thing I should have thought it
necessary to ask.”
“And indeed you are quite right,” said Mrs. Eastwood, faltering. She had
herself inculcated this doctrine. Mercenary marriages she had held up many
and many a time to the scorn of her family; but it is one thing to make a
mercenary marriage, and another to inquire whether the future partner of
your days has anything—“for her own sake,” said Mrs. Eastwood. But as
Frederick was in a disagreeable state of mind, and ready to take offence on
the smallest provocation, she did not take up this view of the question. The
great revelation itself was the chief thing to be considered. “May I not know
something at least about her, Frederick? Where did you meet her? So it is
this that has absorbed you so much for some time? I have noticed it, though
I did not know what it was. Is she pretty, is she nice? Do I know her? You
will not refuse to tell me something about her, my dear.”
“I cannot tell you, for there is nothing settled. It would be unfair to her
until I know myself,” said Frederick; “but, mother, the first part is entirely
within your power. And this is what I wanted—not to pour out any
sentimental secrets into your ear, but to ask what I shall have to calculate
upon. Of course,” said the young man, whose veins were boiling with
impatience, “unless I have some satisfactory settlement with you it would
be dishonourable for me to open my lips at all.”
Mrs. Eastwood was silent. She seemed to have lost the power of
utterance. Was Molyneux right after all? Was it to be a struggle to the death
from henceforth—the children trying how much they could get, the parent
how much she could withhold? She had not heard this suggestion made in
words; but something like it she asked herself piteously, confused, and
startled, and more shocked at herself for the shock and revulsion of feeling
which this demand produced on her than with her son for making it. Was it
possible that she was not ready instantly on the spot to give to him and all
of them whatever they wanted to make them happy? She had said it of
herself, and she believed it, that had they asked for the heart out of her
bosom, she would have given it, and a kind of horror of herself fell upon
her when she felt for the second time a rising of reluctance and almost
resistance within her. On that well-remembered morning when the first
appeal of this kind had been made to her, when Frederick had come to her
bedside and told her he was ruined, no such feeling had been in her mind.
She had cast about instantly what was to be done, and had made her
sacrifice, with poignant grief for the cause, yet with a distinct pleasure in
the power of succouring her boy. But this demand upon her excited no such
feeling. Is it possible that a mother can deny her child anything that is for
his good? she had asked often enough—and now she herself was in the
position of denying. It struck at the very root of all her past principles of
action, of all that she had believed and held by throughout her life. What
did she care for in this world except her children? What was there in this
world that she would not give up for her children? And yet she had (it was
incredible) arrived at a moment when two of them asked a sacrifice from
her for their happiness which in the depths of her heart she knew herself
unwilling to make.
“You do not make me any answer, mother,” said Frederick.
“I cannot all at once,” she said, feeling desperately that to gain time was
the best she could do. “You forget, Frederick, that I was totally
unprepared.”
“But you must have foreseen that such a thing would happen some day,”
he said.
“I ought to have done so, no doubt, but I don’t think I had thought of it.
Of course I hoped you would both marry,” she said falteringly. Stray and
vague thoughts that the marriage of her children should not have involved
as a matter of necessity this attack upon herself floated through her mind—
but she was so deeply penetrated by the absolute horror of her own
reluctance to satisfy them that she felt unable to suggest any possible blame
except to herself.
“I must beg, mother,” said Frederick, “that you will not speak of Nelly
and myself as if we were exactly in the same position. Nelly has her
fortune. Any further demand on her part is quite ridiculous. I, on the other
hand, shall have the credit of the family to keep up. I shall actually be the
head of the family on your death——”
On your death! Is there any human mind which is not conscious of a
startling thrill and wince when these words are said? Mrs. Eastwood nodded
her head in acquiescence, but felt as if her son had calmly fitted and fired an
arrow which went tingling into her heart. Of course, what he said was quite
true.
“I will consider the whole question carefully,” she said, in a tone which
changed in spite of herself, “and I will ask advice. It is strange to take
advice between my children and myself, but you have often told me,
Frederick, I did not understand business. I must think it all over carefully
before I can give you any answer. I have the boys to consider too.”
This she said in a very low tone, not for Frederick, but for herself; for
indeed it was at the bar of a private court of her own that she was standing,
striving to defend herself, which was not easy. She said this humbly by way
of explanation to the judge sitting there, who was a hard judge, and received
no weak excuses.
“The boys, pshaw!” said Frederick. “If Dick goes to India, and Jenny
into the Church, they are both provided for. I do not see that you need to
trouble yourself about the boys——”
“If you had gone into the Church you would have been well provided
for,” said Mrs. Eastwood. “Jenny may have difficulties too——”
“Oh, I would make short work with Jenny’s difficulties!” said Frederick.
That was totally a different question. He went on expounding his views to
her about his brothers till Mrs. Eastwood found the evening cold, and went
in shivering a little and far from happy. She had come to one of the enigmas
of life of which the fin mot was yet to find, and out of which she could not
see her way.
CHAPTER XXIII.
AMANDA.
Frederick’s fever had come to a crisis. The next day was Saturday, and,
without waiting his mother’s answer, he went down to Sterborne in the
afternoon. He could wait no longer. Sterborne is a little town with a large
old church. It would be almost a village but for the minster, which gives it
dignity; and all the people of the place are accustomed to consider their
minster as their private property, and to exhibit it to strangers as something
in which they themselves have had a hand, and for which thanks are due to
them—and not only thanks, but shillings and sixpences. Frederick’s arrival
at the little inn was accordingly set down without doubt to the attractions of
the minster; and while he ate his luncheon the guides who particularly
attached themselves to that establishment collected outside, to be ready for
his service as soon as he should appear.
“The minster, sir? here you are, sir!” said one sharp small creature, half
man, half boy, with elf looks and unnaturally bright eyes. “I’m the reg’lar
guide,” said another. “Them fellows there don’t know nothing—not a single
haltar, or the names of the tombs as are all about the place.” “I can do you a
rubbing of the brasses, sir.” “Here’s photographs, sir, of all the favourite
aspects.”
Thus he was surrounded and beset. He could have knocked them all
down, with pleasure, as they struggled in his way; but as that was not
practicable, he threw their ranks into utter rout by saying plainly, “I don’t
want to go to the minster”—a speech which filled the crowd of Sterborne
with absolute consternation, and almost produced an insurrection in the
place. That any man should profess himself indifferent to the centre of their
town and the world startled them beyond measure. “What did he come to
Sterborne for, if not to see the minster?” While they dispersed from his
path, with an assured conviction in their minds that he must be an infidel
and revolutionary, Frederick called the imp who had first offered his
services.
“I want to go to Mr. Batty’s,” he said.
“To old Batty’s!” cried the lad, turning a somersault on the spot: “here
you are, sir.”
“He’s going to old Batty’s!” cried one of the assistants: and there was a
roar of laughter, which Frederick did not understand, but which made him
angry by instinct.
“Why did they laugh?” he asked, when he had left that mob behind him,
and was following his guide through the High Street.
“We all laughs at old Batty,” was the reply.
“For what reason?” said Frederick sternly: but his conductor only
laughed once more. To tell the truth, there was no reason. The ragamuffins
of the place had made a custom of it; they “always laughed,” but they could
give no reason why. Nevertheless, this very circumstance chilled Frederick.
It was not powerful enough to stop him in his enterprise, but it chilled him.
His old self—his serious self—sprang up at once, and looked his infatuated
and impassioned self in the face, and asked him how he would like to be the
son-in-law of a man at whom the very ragamuffins laughed. His foolish self
replied that the die was cast, that he had committed himself, and had no
way of escape—which, indeed, was a mere pretence, since he had as yet
neither seen the lady of his love nor any one belonging to her; but it
answered his purpose, and stopped the mouth of the gainsayer.
Batty’s house was in the outskirts of the little town. It was an old-
fashioned house, low and straggling, opening direct from the road, with a
little brass-knockered door, raised by one white step from the pavement.
The door opened into a long passage, at the end of which was another door,
which stood wide open, showing a large garden, green and bright with the
afternoon sunshine. Mr. Batty was not at home, the maid informed him who
opened the door; but if the gentleman would walk into the drawing-room or
the garden she would see whether Miss Batty was visible. Frederick, in his
restlessness and the agitation of his mind, preferred the latter, and went into
the garden in a strange, tremulous state of excitement, scarcely knowing
what he was about.
The house had looked pretty and small from the front, with rows of
small twinkling windows and a low roof; but at the back the impression was
very different. Various rooms built on to the original corps du logis stood
out into the lawn, with great bow windows, with green turf at their feet and
creeping plants mantling about them. One of these, evidently the drawing-
room, displayed handsome and luxurious furniture, of a tasteless but costly
kind, through the softly fluttering lace curtains. The garden itself was large
and beautifully cared for, showing both wealth and understanding. This
gave a little comfort to Frederick’s mind, for gardening is an aristocratic
taste. He pleased himself with thinking that perhaps this was Amanda’s
doing; for no one could suspect Batty himself of caring so much for mere
beauty. He walked about the beds and bosquets with a surprised sense of
pleasure, finding the surroundings so much more graceful than he had
hoped—and began to feel that his passion was thus justified. Presently she
would appear, and fill those paths with light. It would be very different from
the aspect under which she appeared in the London hotel. Here she was at
home, surrounded by circumstances which she herself had moulded, which
were sweetly adapted to her: and here for the first time he could see her as
she was. A hope of something better than he had yet known, better than he
deserved, stole over Frederick’s mind, he had fallen in love with mere
beauty—that beauty which is but skin deep, and which all moralists preach
against. Could it be that in so doing he was to find goodness, good taste,
and refinement too?
While he was thus musing, the sound of voices reached him from one of
the open windows. It was a warm afternoon, almost like summer. A
glimmer of firelight made itself visible in at least two of the rooms, and in
both of these the windows were open. Frederick had no intention of
eavesdropping, but when he heard the voice which he remembered so well
he pricked up his ears. I am afraid there are few lovers who would not have
done so. At first the talking was vague—not clear enough to reach him; but
after a while it became louder in tone. The first to make itself heard was a
voice which whimpered and complained, “After twenty years’ work for him
and his: twenty years!” it said; and it wavered about as if the speaker was
walking up and down the room with agitation. Sometimes she would stand
still, and address the person to whom she was speaking, varying from
complaint to anger. Frederick did not know this voice. It was only when
another speaker burst in, in a still louder tone, that the situation became at
all clear to him. The second voice rang at once into his heart. It was
melodious enough in its ordinary sound—a round, full voice, not without
sweetness; but something altogether new and unexpected came into it with
these sharper and louder tones,—
“You are free to go away whenever you choose,” Amanda cried. “I will
not be troubled like this. You know what all the doctors have said, and how
wicked it is to worry me. No one can know better than you do. You are a
wretch; you have no kindness, no feeling. Because you have quarrelled with
papa you want to kill me. What is the use of bullying me? You know you
can go as soon as ever you please. Go and be done with it. You are always
threatening, always saying what you will do——”
“Go!” said the other. “Oh, ’Manda, you to speak of feeling! when I have
been here twenty years, and taken care of you from your childhood. But you
are as cold and as hard as a millstone, though you are so pretty. Oh, if
people only knew how you can talk, and how heartless you are, and the
things you say to your mother’s own sister—her that has brought you up
and taken care of you for twenty years!”
“Taken care of me, indeed,” cried Amanda; “any servant could have
taken care of me. You have been a nuisance since ever I can recollect:
always reminding one that mamma was not a lady, and pulling us down as
far as you could. What were you? Nothing but a lady’s maid. Here you’ve
been tried to be made a lady of, and had handsome dresses given you, and
all sorts of things. Of course it was for our own sakes. What was there in
you to make us take any trouble? You are old, you are plain, and vulgar, and
disagreeable. What right have you to be kept like a lady in pa’s house? You
are only good enough to scrub the floor. Why have you always stayed on
when nobody wanted you? I suppose you thought you might marry pa when
ma was dead and gone, though it’s against the law. Of course that was what
you wanted—to be mistress of the house, and get him under your thumb,
and rule over me. Try it, aunty! You won’t find me so easy to rule over! Just
try! An old, ugly, vulgar, spiteful creature, with no recommendation and no
character——”
“ ’Manda, ’Manda,” cried the other, “Oh, don’t be so cruel!—--”
“I will be cruel, if you call that cruel. There’s more than that coming.
What is the good of you, but to make a slave and a drudge of? Why should
pa keep you but for that? Aunty, indeed! He was a fool ever to let me call
you so. And so he is a soft-hearted fool, or he never would have kept you
on for years and years. If he had but asked me, you should have been
packed off ages ago. You to put on airs, indeed, and say you won’t do
anything you’re told to do! Go, this minute, you wicked woman, and don’t
worry me. Fancy, me! to sit here and listen to you as if you were worthy to
be listened to—you who are no better than the dirt under my feet.”
“ ’Manda, you dare to speak like that to your own flesh and blood!”
“I dare do a great deal more,” cried Amanda. “I dare to turn you out of
doors, bag and baggage; and I will, if you don’t mind. You old Jezebel—
you old hag, as pa says—you horrid painted witch—you wicked woman!
Get out of my sight, or I’ll throw something at you—I will! Go away! If
you are not gone in one moment—you witch—you old hag——”
Here a smash of something breaking told that the gentle Amanda had
kept her word. There was a suppressed cry, a scuffle, a scream, and then the
bell was rung violently.
“Oh, I suppose it’s my fault,” cried the other voice, with a whimpering
cry. “Bring the bottle out of her room—the one at her bedside. Give me the
eau-de-cologne. Here’s she been and fainted. Quick! Quick! ’Manda! I
didn’t mean it, dear! I don’t mind! Manda! Lord, you were red enough just
now—don’t look so dead white!”
Was it Frederick’s guardian angel that had made him an auditor of this
scene? The loud voice declaiming, the string of abusive words, the clash of
the missile thrown, were horrible and strange to him as the language of
demons. He was thunderstruck. Her language had not always been pleasant
to him, but he was not prepared for anything like this. He walked up and
down in a state of mind which it would be impossible to describe. His first
impulse was flight. There was still time for him to get away altogether, to
escape from this horrible infatuation, to escape from her and her dreadful
father, and everything belonging to her. Should he go? Then he reflected he
had given his card, and so far compromised himself. Was this sufficient to
detain a man who had just been subjected to the hardest trial in the world, a
sudden disgust for the woman whom he thought he loved? Frederick stood
still, he paused, his heart was rent in two. He was within reach of her,
almost within sight of her, and must he go without seeing her, unworthy as
she might be? It was not necessary, he said to himself, that anything should
follow, that he should carry out the intention with which he came. That was
impossible—however lovely and sweet and fair she might be, he would not
take a low-bred termagant into his bosom. No, no! that was over for ever.
But how could he go without seeing her, after he had given his card and
announced himself? This would be to expose himself to her wrath and her
father’s, in whose power to some extent he was. He could hear the voices
through the open window as he wandered about the garden, arguing with
himself. Should he go? Should he stay? Strangely enough, though he had
been told that agitation might be fatal to her, he was not anxious about her,
though he surmised that she had fainted. His disgust took this form. If she
were ill after her outbreak, she deserved it. On the whole he was almost
pleased that she should be ill. She had humiliated him as well as herself,
and he had a vindictive satisfaction in feeling that she was punished for it;
but further than this he did not go. No; of course all was over; he could
never be her suitor, never ask her to give him the hand with which she had
thrown something which crashed and broke at her companion’s head.
Never! that was over; but why should not he see her, behold her beauty
once more—give himself that last pleasure? He would never seek her again;
she had disgusted, revolted, turned his mind away from her. But since he
was already so near, since he had given his card, since it would be known at
once why he went away, this once, not for love, but for scornful
gratification of his contemptuous admiration, just as he would look at a
statue or picture, he would see her again.
This was the foolish reasoning with which he subdued the wiser instinct
that prompted him to fly. Why should he fly? A woman capable of
speaking, acting, thinking as this woman had done, could no longer have
any power over a man who, whatever might be his moral character, had still
the tastes and impulses of a gentleman. She had made an end of her sway
over him, he thought; that dream could never come back again. Nobody but
a madman would ask such a creature to marry him. To marry him? to be
taken to his mother’s house, and promoted into the society of gentlefolk?
Never! He laughed bitterly at the notion. But, thank Heaven! he had not
betrayed himself. Thank Heaven! that merely to see her would commit him
to nothing. No, he ended by convincing himself the most manly course was
to pay his visit as if nothing had happened, to see the syren who was no
longer a syren to him, but only a beautiful piece of flesh and blood, whom
he might look at and admire like a statue. This was, he repeated to himself,
the most manly course. The phrase was pleasant to him. To run away would
look as if he had no confidence in his own moral force and power of
resisting temptation. But the fact was that there could be no longer any
temptation in the matter. To see her, and prove to himself that disgust had
altogether destroyed the fierce violent wild love which had swallowed up
all his better resolution, was the only manly course to take.
He was standing by one of the flower-beds, stamping down
unconsciously with his boot the border of long-leaved crocuses which had
gone out of flower, but quite unaware of the damage he was doing, when
the maid who admitted him came back. She apologized for keeping him so
long waiting. Miss ’Manda had been taken bad sudden—one of her bad
turns—nothing out of the common—but now was better, and would he go
up-stairs, please?
“Was she well enough to see him?” Frederick asked, with a momentary
thrill of alarm, feeling his heart begin to beat.
“Oh, quite well enough. They don’t last long, these bad turns. You will
find her a bit shaken, sir, and she didn’t ought to be excited or put out, but
she’s better,” said the maid. Better! the scold, the termagant, the beautiful
fury; but still Frederick’s heart beat at the thought of seeing her again.
She was lying on a sofa close to the open window, looking very pale and
languid, just as she had been on that delicious evening which he had last
spent in her company, looking as if nothing but gentle words could ever
come out of those lovely lips. The woman whom she had called Aunty, and
whom she had been abusing, sat by her holding a white hand, which looked
as if it had been modelled in ivory. Was that the hand? One of poor aunty’s
cheeks was red as fire, as if she had been struck on it, and she had evidently
been crying. But she was full of solicitude for her charge, placing the
cushions behind her comfortably, and whispering and soothing her.
Frederick asked himself if he had been in a dream. Amanda held out her
other hand to him with gentle languor, and smiled at him an angelic smile.
“Is it really you, Mr. Frederick Eastwood?” she said. “We have been
wondering over your card. I could not think what could keep you here. Are
you staying at the Court? But Sir Geoffrey is not at home——”
“No! I had business in this part of the country, and thought I would avail
myself of your father’s invitation—that is for an hour or two. I must return
to town to-night,” he answered, proud of his own fortitude, but feeling, oh,
such a melting and dissolving of all his resolutions.
“That is a very short visit; but I hope papa may be able to persuade you
to stay longer,” said Amanda. “You do not mind my receiving you on the
sofa? I have been ill. Oh, you must not be too sorry for me,” she added,

The Ambivalence of Good Human Rights in International Politics Since The 1940S Jan Eckel Full Chapter

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The Ambivalence of Good: Human

Rights in International Politics since the

Introduction: The Ambivalence of Good 1

AfS Archiv für Sozialgeschichte

2 The Ambivalence of Good

4 The Ambivalence of Good

6 The Ambivalence of Good

Another, less-developed strand of interpretation emphasizes the inconsistencies

racial discrimination and the commitment to religious tolerance.8 Furthermore,

8 The Ambivalence of Good

10 The Ambivalence of Good

12 The Ambivalence of Good

grounds for actually establishing one in the revolutionary and counterrevolutionary

14 The Ambivalence of Good

I am grateful to the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft for a research grant that

16 The Ambivalence of Good

security, the political problems generated by protecting minorities, as overseen

attempts to protect minorities, colonial peoples, or women and children. Some of

2 Cf. on the USA, Declaration of Independence, 1776 http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/

18 The Ambivalence of Good

20 The Ambivalence of Good

could be pacified through legal proceedings. Thus, there was an unprecedented

22 The Ambivalence of Good

24 The Ambivalence of Good

28 Cf. Miller‚ ‘Geneva’, fn 3.

26 The Ambivalence of Good

Shotwell’s rather discouraging historical summary was a fair assessment of future

28 The Ambivalence of Good

that attached considerable weight to propagandistic indoctrination, while barely

30 The Ambivalence of Good

Cassin’s intellectual career in particular reveals several significant lines of development

49 Cf. The American Jewish Committee, Counsellors. 50 Cf. Fink, Defending.

32 The Ambivalence of Good

of international women’s organizations. Instead of arguing for specific women’s

34 The Ambivalence of Good

dramatically increased their appreciation for the pre-constitutional individual

68 Adam von Trott zu Solz, ‘Denkschrift’, April 1942. In Europa-Föderationspläne, edited by

interaction between the experiences of national Catholic Churches under the

36 The Ambivalence of Good

77 Brechenmacher, ‘Enzyklika’, p. 284.

ABOUT ANOTHER MARRIAGE.

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Introduction: The Ambivalence of Good 1