Realism is accurate and induces peace---the alt fails to overcome it.

For human rights still require states to enforce them, just not the same state that is repressing or violating them. But the enforcement of rights by external states or by “the international community” means war. Immanuel Kant warned that peace could not come from forcing a single state that refused to accept even a positive value or policy of the world community to get in line, since that is not peace but war (Kant). Machiavelli warned that republics need a plurality of republics, able to criticize each other, encourage each other to best practices, engage in competition. When all republics fall under a single central power—even a collective one—we find an empire, not a republic. A condition in which the world community was unanimous and forced a recalcitrant state into accepting policies it and its citizens had not approved would be analogous to empire, to that world polity that Arendt likewise warned would not result in a stronger enforcement of rights, but in the greatest threat to them, and one without external recourse for redress (Arendt 298).

Nor are these abstract problems. Mark Mazower has painstakingly shown that the entire conception of international law has always been based on the “standard of civilization” in which certain states were within such a standard, and so legitimized to enforce their conception of international law, while other peoples and states and communities were outside of it, and so vulnerable to having the will of others imposed upon them (Mazower 70). In short, colonialism, neocolonialism, and the current regime of human rights are closely linked, and it is no accident that the countries that find themselves targets of humanitarian interventions under the “responsibility to protect” are ones that are not within the current updated version of the standard of civilization—that is to say, not allies of the United States and often opposed to neoliberalism. Thus, even in shifting from the older national government’s responsibility to its own citizens to a conception that the international community has a responsibility to protect human rights, we find that we have merely changed which fox is guarding the chickens.

Human Rights and Global Citizenship As a legalistic concept, human rights require a political authority to define what they are legally. One of the most widely cited works on human rights, Jack Donnelly’s Universal Human Rights in Theory and Practice fails from the start on this point with its key analogy: human rights, like property rights, are a preexisting condition. This notion has already been dismantled by Arendt as shown above. By contrast, international relations theorists recognize that human rights must be granted and recognized by global institutions, but the lack of a central international authority makes this very difficult. The realist school of international relations (Morgenthau; Waltz) sees anarchy reigning in a state of nature in world politics, making the protection of human rights well nigh impossible. The so-called English School of International Relations sees an international society as precarious, in which norms, though real, are enforced by national states that see adherence to such norms as advantageous for maintaining the international society and in the interest of the individual states in question (Bull). These theories are united in that they see international organizations as instruments for carrying out what has already been agreed to by national states. Neither position posits a global polity as existing, and many theorists in each camp would see such a polity as undesirable. Others are less pessimistic. Constructivists view human rights as a discourse that has achieved a certain degree of autonomy from institutional settings, though the geopolitical limits on the discourse remain (Risse; Ropp and Sikkinke 16). Some political theorists seek to found human rights solely on the narrow basis of historical liberal theory, with all the baggage that this involves—from class privilege and economic doctrine to the policies of existing international organizations such as the IMF and WTO, and with the historical affiliation with Anglo-American hegemonies intact (Charvet and Nay). Samuel Moyn’s demonstration of the Christian roots of human rights merely shifts the instrument of human rights formation from political constitutionalism to Christian ethos. In both cases, however, the Western origin of the rights concept belies its alleged universality. Donnelly’s influential work engages in intellectual gymnastics to find a plausible basis for universal human rights. But even this work admits that despite all, people must live in determined polities or they would find themselves in a Hobbesian state of nature, and that in the end states have human rights responsibilities only to their own citizens and territorial residents (Donnelly 30–32).

Clearly, only global citizenship could address all of these difficulties, and there has been considerable work done on developing that idea. Robert Paehlke seeks the basis for global citizenship in the movements to limit corporate depravity and U.S. militarism worldwide, hoping ironically that the opposition to the current global governance regime will provide that same regime with a stronger basis for legitimacy (Paehlk 15, 200–02). Andrew Moravcsik instead argues that democratic republican governments have often accepted the limitations on sovereignty imposed by international human rights regimes when the gains in reducing domestic political uncertainty—the risk of having a domestic opposition reverse preferred policies—outweigh that compromise (Moravcsik 217–52). Efforts at conceptualizing a “global democracy” are perpetually challenged by the lack of any global, or even international, or even European demos or people (Held 220). Aristotle’s criteria continue to matter in the twenty-first century. It seems difficult to avoid the conclusion that even under the most global of human rights regimes, rights remain inextricably tied to domestic politics and national governments. If there is a role for civil society and popular social movements, their impact must be primarily at the national level, and be differentiated in that impact in different countries and political communities. To be effective beyond national boundaries, they must act in concrete ways in solidarity with brother and sister movements and struggles or with efforts to bring about analogous gains to those already won or being fought for in each other’s national political communities. This means that the struggles, acts of solidarity, and discourses of movements from the pre-globalization era, especially from the immediately preceding era of anti-colonial and analogous movements, are surprisingly relevant to addressing our problems today.