By John Harter

The Foreign Service can help provide an "ideological edge in human rights" says Ambassador Michael Novak, who served as U.S. representative to the United Nations Human Rights Commission in the early 1980s. In this interview, Novak, currently at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) in Washington, examines the new prominence accorded human rights during the 1980s and the reforms adopted by some regimes. Novak believes that Foreign Service officers must be better trained to participate in the "war of ideas." Novak developed some of these themes at a talk at the Foreign Service Club in December 1990. The interview, conducted by retired Foreign Service officer John Harter, has been edited for length.

John Harter: Can you clarify what you mean by "human rights"?

Michael Novak: There are two routes to understanding human rights: through religion and through philosophers like John Locke in England and James Madison in the United States. The religious argument was that God made every human being--not just Christians and Jews--in his image, capable of reflection and choice and that to honor this image is to honor God, and to defile it is to insult God. The philosophers argued that every human being fears torture, fearing that under torture, he could be made to go against his own will; and therefore a regime must be created in which torture is not legitimate.

Harter: What does the phrase "human rights" mean in practical terms today?

Novak: It means that citizens may not be tortured, forced to violate their conscience or compelled to say what they don't mean. It means they have a right to speak out, to take part in civil life, and to state their own views. Those rights cannot be abridged, and any government that seeks to abridge those rights to that extent is illegitimate and may lose the consent of its citizens--with the expectation that other nations will support their efforts to seek redress.

Harter: Clearly the first 10 amendments to the U.S. Constitution represent a substantial portion of what you mean by human rights...

Novak: And I'm reluctant to multiply those rights much further. We shouldn't use the word "rights" profligately, so that it loses its value.

Harter: Do you see any connection between respect for human rights and economic development?

Novak: Absolutely! An important capacity of the human being is the capacity to be creative in the production of goods and services--a capacity that is at the heart of economic development. Pope John Paul II has recognized that capacity as a fundamental right as deep as the right to liberty of conscience.

The people of Eastern Europe see quite clearly today that they won't be satisfied with democracy unless they are part of a dynamic, growing economy. They won't be happy solely to vote every two or four years unless they see improvement in their daily lives.

Harter: But why does the extension of human rights encourage economic development?

Novak: New wealth comes from invention and discovery, not by taking from others. It doesn't come from dividing the pie up a little differently, but from imagining and producing new things--this requires rights to personal enterprise, personal initiative, and economic creativity, not to mention private property.

Harter: Who gets credit for the U.S. emphasis on human rights?

Novak: Prodded by Senator "Scoop" Jackson, after his inauguration, President Jimmy Carter gave some eloquent speeches on [human rights] at Notre Dame and elsewhere...Jimmy Carter really did put human rights in the consciousness of U.S. foreign-policy makers. He named Patt Derian assistant secretary for Human Rights, and, after some resistance and confusion in the Department of State, it went forward.

Harter: That was the origin of the department's annual reports on human rights?

Novak: Yes, the annual reports began at that time. They have been getting better, year by year, and they have had an impact! When I was the U.S. representative to the U.N. Human Rights Commission in Geneva, I saw the delegations of other countries line up when those books arrived in the third week of the session. Every delegate would immediately turn to the pages on his own country, and each and every one of them took quite seriously every word.

There was some complaint from senators that the Carter Administration gave too much emphasis to declarations and too little to follow-up. It sometimes seemed that they let the perfect be the enemy of the good...We saw what happened in Iran and Nicaragua, for example, as examples of going from bad to worse, because of an inadequate grasp of all the factors at stake.

Harter: What was the response of the Reagan Administration to those issues?

Novak: The Reagan Administration, bending over backward to be bipartisan in this area, chose such persons as Jeane Kirkpatrick, Richard Schifter, and Elliott Abrams, who had grown up in the Humphrey-Moynihan-Jackson wing of the Democratic Party--Democrats who had long been concerned about the practical implementation of human rights. With this group, the emphasis swiftly went from talking about human rights to encouraging democratic institutions that would secure human rights. By 1990, 15 former military dictatorships (chiefly in Latin America) had taken some steps--sometimes only partial, but quite considerable in other cases--in the direction of democracy. Democracy took root in the Philippines and even began to be a battle cry in the Soviet Union, not to mention Eastern Europe.

Harter: Do you feel President Reagan had a personal interest in those developments?

Novak: I do. His eloquence evoked echoes all around the world. There was ample evidence of that when he went to Poland a year after his presidency and to the Soviet Union. He said things that made people think, "You know, that's right!" But it's not enough to have pieces of paper with human rights written on them: you have to have institutions that guarantee due process to protect these rights.

It was the threat of military force that convinced Marcos that he would have to leave the Philippines, for example; and it was the withholding of aid to the Chilean military that put great pressure and embarrassment on Pinochet, especially when some very hard-nosed American ambassadors made it plain to Pinochet that we weren't kidding. I believe President Reagan was personally concerned about developments in those two countries, and others.

Harter: Can you think of two or three countries in which there has been significant improvement in dealing with human rights in recent years?

Novak: That has been the case in most of Latin America--Latin Americans now live under regimes that are much more democratic. They may be imperfectly democratic, in that they don't all have good, independent judiciaries, for example, but at least they elect congresses and presidents, and their governments change from party to party. Human rights are better protected than they were under the many military dictatorships of the late 1970s.

Harter: What were the reasons for those improvements?

Novak: The improvements came about when ordinary people realized that the anti-democratic tendencies of both the left and the right are dangerous. I remember vividly an argument I heard in Chile in the early 1980s: I heard some socialists speak about democracy as a bourgeois illusion, and I heard some of the Pinochet people say democracy would never work in Chile.

Well, just a few years later, those same socialists still said democracy is a bourgeois illusion, but they added that it sure beats being tortured or thrown in prison! And those same Pinochet supporters said, "I didn't mean that this torture should be permitted. I'm not prepared to support that." In election after election, throughout Latin America, majorities have chosen governments that oppose the left and the right. They voted against the generals and the extremists whenever they had a chance--and they voted for liberal government and economic growth.

Harter: What do you think of the UN Declaration of Human Rights?

Novak: Oh, I think that was an enormous achievement. The political and civil rights sections are basically derived from the U.S. experience, and they closely follow our own Bill of Rights. It was an enormous achievement to make those principles the common law of nations.

Harter: But has it had an impact on events?

Novak: Oh, there's no question about that. It was obvious to me at the Helsinki talks in 1986 that even then the Yugoslavs, Czechoslovaks, and Hungarians, for example, Communists though they were, would have voted with the West if they could have, time and time again. But they had to toe the line.

Harter: What do you think of the UN Human Rights Commission?

Novak: I had never been involved with the U.S. Foreign Service before the 1980s, and at first I didn't want to go. But one day after the inauguration of President Reagan, Jeane Kirkpatrick came up to me in the AEI dining room. She had been asked to be U.S. representative to the United Nations, and she asked me if I would go to Geneva. She thought I could articulate what the United States stands for as a nation founded by people who wanted freedom to exercise their rights. She wanted us to call attention to the fact that we would condone no abuse of human rights anywhere in the world. So she persuaded me.

When I got to Geneva, at my first meeting as the U.S. representative to the Human Rights Commission, I was shocked at the way everybody attacked Israel. Given all the countries in the world that abuse human rights, it did not seem to me that Israel was an appropriate focus. The invective and the mood were so ugly that I wrote a private letter to Jeane, saying, "I feel like a rat drowning in the sewers of Constantinople! Why did you send me here?" She still teases me about that.

Harter: Did you drown?

Novak: No, we fought back! We started to speak as directly and clearly as possible, and we laid down markers on where we stood. On my first night in Geneva, a group of Western Europeans and others invited me to dinner, and they all looked at me as though I had green hair. I realized then that I was the first Reaganaut in captivity, and they were all eager to hear what I had to say.

All the questions were directed at me, and, finally, I said, "Look, a great nation is like an aircraft carrier--it changes policies very slowly, only a few degrees at a time. Our briefing book was prepared by the Carter Administration, but we'll rarely deviate from it. Our policy on human rights will be amazingly consistent, because our national ideals are consistent." However, I said, there may be one difference: the Carter Administration would give very eloquent and ringing speeches, and then sometimes end up voting in a weaker way. "On the other hand," I said, "we will try to align our votes exactly with our speeches."

Harter: So you feel the Human Rights Commission accomplishes useful results?

Novak: Yes, I think so, especially when the Carter and Reagan Administrations concentrated on actions, not words. As a direct result of concerted activities--sometimes behind the scenes--people were released from prison. We had reason to believe that certain disappearances which might have happened did not happen, because of the pressure brought to bear. The drive for human rights contributed to the developments that later took place in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Before 1982, believe it or not, the Human Rights Commission had never voted to condemn human rights abuses in those countries. The Helsinki Agreement set standards for Eastern Europe, and that helped in Geneva...If you change the way people think, their behavior will change, and that puts great pressure on politicians. So I think debates and resolutions in the UN Human Rights Commission--and the Helsinki process--put pressure on governments. The Helsinki Monitors, Amnesty International, and other organizations like that help mobilize a constituency for change around the world.

Harter: Do you think the Department of State is optimally equipped, institutionally and also in terms of specialized personnel, for giving appropriate attention to human rights?

Novak: Increasingly so. If there is a weakness in the Department of State, in my view, it is that people who are attracted to the Foreign Service are more interested in practicing diplomacy than they are in the ideological work that is a necessary prerequisite to the effective practice of diplomacy. They tend to be mostly intelligent and idealistic people, but after they enter the Foreign Service, their daily routine usually involves them in a lot of non-idealistic work. They have taken a real interest in the human rights reports, however, and every year those reports are receiving more attention--they are more detailed and they command more support throughout the foreign policy establishment. But that kind of work runs counter to the basic tendencies of the diplomatic service, where you're usually trying to clean up the debris left by controversy. I think the department needs an ideological edge, perhaps in the form of a cadre of highly competent people whose job it is to think institutionally about long-range trends and ideas that may prevail 10 years from now.

Harter: Do you mean we need a strong policy planning operation?

Novak: Yes, we do, but I was thinking of something even more abstract and perhaps more ambitious than that..I think we need people in the Department of State who are removed from the everyday world of foreign affairs to advance an agenda that mixes idealism with realism. Furthermore, in the world as it is, propaganda has become a major form of political power, and it seems to me that Foreign Service officers are generally not well trained in either generating or combating effective propaganda. They tend to agree too much, even with their avowed adversaries. But when it's adverse propaganda, you have to be more aggressive and knock it down immediately. In short, I would like to see the Department of State develop better training in the war of ideas.