Social Justice in an Open World: The Role of the United Nations
economic and, a fortiori, social and cultural rights are perceived as nothing more than objectives that have been unduly presented as rights under pressure from Marxist intellectuals or in response to the failure of regimes to respect their obligations to their citizens as defined in the Magna Carta, the American Declaration of Independence, and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. It is argued that many of these so-called economic and social rights, such as the right to strike or the right to form a trade union, are transitory and inseparable from particular sets of economic, social and political conditions. Economic globalization and the emergence of a knowledge-based and service-oriented economy have, it is asserted, rendered such "rights" obsolete. In this school of thought, human rights represents an umbrella term for civil and political rights, including equality between women and men. To ensure that this concept is clearly understood, these same countries insist on explicit references to democracy, good governance, and various forms of transparency and accountability among public institutions. This essentially adds up to a type of regime, roughly a liberal capitalist democracy, presented as a model to the world. The notion of good governance, often associated with the existence of a political regime whose main function is to facilitate the interplay of market forces, appeared in the United Nations towards the end of the 1980s and found its way into the Copenhagen Declaration before becoming a commonplace term in international parlance. Mention of the right to development is tolerated by these same countries on the grounds that it is so vague a notion as to be completely harmless; it represents a costless concession to developing countries. The pursuit of international justice, or the narrowing of the various gaps between developed and developing countries, is a central part of the Copenhagen Declaration, incorporated to ensure political syncretism or comprehensiveness. Social development, in particular the elimination of poverty and the achievement of full employment and social integration, requires international cooperation and an international environment favourable to national efforts. Commitment 1 of the Declaration, relating to the creation of an environment that will "enable people to achieve social development", emphasizes that increased cooperation, a supportive economic environment established and maintained through appropriate macroeconomic policies, trade liberalization, and the "mobilization andlor provision of new and additional financial resources" (para. (j)) are needed at the international level. Commitment 9, which focuses on these financial resources, includes all the traditional provisions on finance, official development assistance, debt, and technology (though the word "flow" is used instead of "transfer"), as well as some new provisions relating to activities such as the monitoring and assessment of "the impact of trade liberalization on the progress made in developing countries to meet basic human needs" (para. (q)).