In a recent NYT opinion piece sparked by the now-resolved international episode of the blind Chinese activist Chen Guangcheng’s escape from house arrest to American protection, Samuel Moyn considers the evolving implications of “human rights.” Moyn is the author of The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History, in which he argues that the modern conception of human rights begins not with the UN’s 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but in the decade after 1968. In his op-ed, Moyn writes that what was initially an “uncontroversial effort to establish moral norms above the fray of the cold war’s ideological battles” has since become both more familiar and less clear-cut:
In reporting on Mr. Chen, most publications, including this newspaper, used the terms “dissident” and even “prisoner of conscience” to refer to him.
However, since the time Amnesty International and other groups popularized those phrases, human rights—a term that once meant the defense of individuals against the oppression of an unjust state—has come to imply other things, too.
Today, it is just as likely to be invoked by powerful states to wage war in distant corners of the globe, much to the chagrin of authoritarian leaders in wealthy rising powers like Russia and China, who see such “humanitarian interventions” as a violation of states’ sovereignty—not to mention a threat to their manner of rule.
Moyn goes on to detail how the concept of human rights has “lost some of its romantic appeal and moral purity” and become a political tool. Even still, he writes, human rights can be useful to “Chinese dissidents and their Western allies” just as they’d been to the “glamorous dissidents” who came before.
In describing Chen, Moyn knowingly evokes the codified concept of the dissident (“the lone icon speaking for moral principle against totalitarian rule, the anonymous but courageous network at home that sheltered him, the supporters abroad who rallied around his cause, and the governments that made their choices based on a difficult calculus of moral ideals and geopolitical interests”), but elsewhere uses “dissent” in a fairly straightforward fashion. A short op-ed can sustain only so much complication, to be sure, but it’s interesting to see the concept of dissent taken as stable in the course of a discussion of the evolution of human rights.
Jonathan Bolton’s Worlds of Dissent: Charter 77, The Plastic People of the Universe, and Czech Culture under Communism is another recent HUP book that deals with some of the same events and themes as does Moyn in The Last Utopia. Bolton’s book unpacks the myths and the glamour to show how the struggle against state repression was felt by those who lived it, making clear the messy humanity of dissent.
In February 1979, Zdeněk Mlynář—an architect of the Prague Spring reform movement in 1968, who was later expelled from the Party and helped formulate the human-rights proclamation Charter 77—wrote: “The term ‘dissident’ is one of the least precise in the contemporary political vocabulary.” Today, historians have ceased to interrogate the term, but it remains as vague and problematic as it was thirty years ago. Conceptions of dissent are still shaped by the vocabulary of the Cold War. The most common model of the dissident personality is constructed from just a few basic planks—courage, truthfulness, steadfast self-confidence. Dissidents are portrayed with a mixture of romanticism (jailed intellectuals writing prison letters, adventurers smuggling secret publications across barbed-wire borders) and political idealism (a few rare souls with the moral courage to speak out against the state, at great personal risk). Both the romanticism and the idealism contain some truth, but they also speak to Western dreams and desires—a belief in heroes, a yearning for a clear stand against evil, a hope for more fulfilling forms of political participation.
Views of Central European dissent, in fact, have always been shaped by the selective perceptions of the West. Most dissidents considered the term “dissent” to be a coinage of American and West European journalists. During the Cold War, the West—newspaper editors and academic scholars alike—selected a few dissident thinkers and fashioned them into a transnational pantheon that conducted an international conversation about antipolitics, civil society, and living in truth. In this pantheon, there was room for one or two thinkers from each country—next to Havel one usually found the Pole Adam Michnik, the Hungarian György Konrád, and a constellation of other figures, with minor changes from one receiving country to the next, often depending on which dissident writings had been translated into which languages. These political and philosophical debates shaped the way Communism and Central European history were understood in the West, which often thought it was listening in on a conversation that, in fact, it had helped to stage by choosing and translating the thinkers—brilliant and influential thinkers, to be sure—that spoke most closely to its own concerns.
In the years since Havel’s landmark essay [“The Power of the Powerless,” 1978], his ironic characterization of dissent has been forgotten. Historians speak of “dissent” or “the dissident movement,” reducing a diverse phenomenon to a simple, unifying label. They continue to work with terms and definitions inherited from the Cold War, even as the understanding of Communist society and culture has evolved out of a black-and-white Cold War framework. We speak of “the dissidents” as if we knew who they were and, indeed, as if they knew who they were. In fact, the very definition of “dissent” was a major concern of opposition intellectuals in Central Europe in the 1970s and 1980s. Was it meaningful, even possible, to bracket off a small group of people and to judge the rest of society using them as the moral measuring stick? And how did society degenerate to the point where so few people seemed to speak for it?
“Dissent was born of a particular world,” Bolton goes on to write, “and that world was born in the fall of 1968.” Together Worlds of Dissent and The Last Utopia help us to understand that world and those that have followed.
