The wrong rights.

The Clinton Administration seems not to have learned from the Carter Administration's difficulties that a U.S. crusade for `human rights' risks pushing our friends into alliance with our enemies.

When Michael Fay bent over last May to take four strokes of the cane in Singapore's Queenstown Remedial Prison, he probably did not realize that his gluteus maximus had become the focal point of Samuel Huntington's "clash of civilizations." It was all over in a few minutes, and Fay was released shortly thereafter. Back home in the U.S., he has been far more modest about his ordeal than many of his champions. "I mean, let's not exaggerate," he told Larry King. "It was like a bloody nose."

At his high point, Michael Fay talked about possibly working for Amnesty International and speaking to Congress on human rights. The intervening months, however, have seen him pushed off the front page into the "people" column, where his butane sniffing and brush with local police have been gleefully chronicled. Yet though Fay himself has receded, the underlying frictions his case brought to the fore - specially those involving U.S. human-rights agitation abroad - continue to irritate and will doubtless become an occasion for further ill will in Jakarta this month at the annual meeting of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum.

What has bothered Asians most about the American reaction to the Fay case is the flagrant double standard. To put the incident in context, last year 46 Korean-Americans were shot, 19 of them fatally, during robbery attempts in Los Angeles County alone. Just before the Fay caning, two 19-year-old Japanese students were gunned down in a San Pedro parking lot during a car jacking. This was followed by a flurry of articles in the U.S. press arguing that the attention lavished on the dead Japanese was unwarranted given that an average of 16 people are murdered in L.A. every weekend. All this has been steady fare for the Asian press, whose readers are left with an impression of American life that has more in common with MTV than with Norman Rockwell.

If the complaints about America were simply the latest whines from the professional Third Worldists, they would be easily dismissed. There are those, too, but today's grumbles about America come from middle-class people who wish America well, and in most ways they are indistinguishable from the complaints made by Bill Bennett in his Index of Leading Cultural Indicators. Indeed, Asia's grievance does not stem from the leftist critique; on the contrary, it comes from people who are afraid that American society has accepted that leftist critique and is now bent on exporting it.

With the Evil Empire out of the way, Asia faces no immediate, overwhelming threat to its security. Furthermore, the region's phenomenal economic growth has led its inhabitants to think, not without reason, that they may now have as much to teach the world about rights and priorities as to learn from it. Asians no longer feel that when Washington barks they have to back down. At the same time, they are afraid of American-style chaos. The search for "Asian values" is a reaction against what they see as American individualism run amok.

The APEC Summit

All this is about to come to a head again in Indonesia, where Bill Clinton will be attending the APEC summit this month. APEC is hardly the leading organization in the Orient, but last year in Seattle Clinton pushed it hard, if only as a photo op to counter Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad's proposal for a grouping that would exclude America. Having made so much of APEC when he was host, Clinton can hardly back away now that it is someone else's turn. This is especially true when that someone else is President Suharto of Indonesia, leader of the world's fourth most populous nation (and largest Muslim one), head of the non-aligned movement, and an important American friend.

Last year's meeting marked the beginning of the end for Clinton's China, policy, for it was there that Chinese President Jiang Zemin called his bluff. Although not a single Asian nation supported Clinton's proposed linking of China's trade status with human-rights conditions, at that stage Clinton was still relatively new, and most Asian leaders were eager to paper over the differences and hope for the best. All except Jiang, who gave Clinton a stem talking to at their private meeting. Several weeks later, during Secretary of State Warren Christopher's trip to Peking, the Chinese followed this up by tossing several dissidents in jail and all but daring Clinton to revoke the country's most-favored-nation status. "It was the worst I had ever seen an American diplomat treated," says a career foreign-service official who was in Peking at the time.

This year the Administration has come full circle on China, with Ron Brown chaperoning U.S. corporate fatcats to the Middle Kingdom to preside over grand contract signings. And after the China debacle, the White House seems keen to avoid a spat with Indonesia. The U.S. embassy in Jakarta has declared that workers' rights will not be brought up at APEC because the forum is inappropriate, and the Commerce Department has been promoting Indonesia as a key site for U.S. investment.

The more sensible the Clinton Administration becomes, alas, the louder the howls from human-rights activists. During the 1992 campaign, candidate Clinton traversed the country attacking the Reagan and Bush Administrations for their foreign-policy cynicism. Yet Clinton's endorsement of a new, rights-based policy opened him up to even more bitter attacks on this score as the realities of life have forced him toward a more temperate stance. Thus, the chief of Amnesty International called human rights the "sacrificial lamb" offered up to trade, and thus, in the run-up to the coming APEC meeting, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have released new reports on human-rights violations in Indonesia, with the specific intent of embarrassing President Clinton into action. Meanwhile, more than 2,500 journalists, about half of them from America, will converge on Indonesia. You can bet that U.S. papers and TV will soon be full of stories from East Timor. Are the Timorese less deserving of democracy than the Haitians? That's probably not the question to ask, but it is the question that will be asked.

The Clintonites - like the Carterites before them - have not grasped that they cannot turn these issues on and off at will. While interests are specific and may be argued on a case-by-case basis, a foreign policy based on advancing the abstract rights of man is condemned to universality. If China really doesn't deserve its MFN status, what about countries like Indonesia and Libya? If American GIs are required in Haiti, why not in Cuba, Bosnia, or even Somalia? If workers' rights are an issue in GATT, why won't they be raised inside APEC?

Idealism vs. Realpolitik 

The pursuit of U.S. interests should be guided and tempered by certain ideals; a French-style Realpolitik is simply incompatible with the American temperament, however much it might advance American interests. But while compromise in the pursuit of hard interests represents the natural give and take of diplomacy, once a nation's diplomacy is grounded in the legislation and enforcement of universal rights, that same compromise must inevitably be treated as a cynical sellout.

Asia is not blind to the threat a human-rights based American Administration poses. In March 1993, representatives of some forty Asian nations from Singapore to Iran gathered in Bangkok to prepare for the UN-sponsored World Conference on Human Rights that would take place that June in Vienna. They came to put forward an "Asian concept" of human rights that would neutralize the final statement expected from Vienna. Although the Bangkok Declaration reaffirmed support for the "universality, objectivity, and non-selectivity of human rights," it went on to say that their application "must be considered in the context of . . . national and regional particularities and various historical, cultural, and religious backgrounds." Development was found to be an "inalienable right," and nations were warned against using "human rights as a conditionality for extending development assistance." The subtext was that developing countries have the right to taxpayer dollars from the West without conditions.

If the declaration itself was predictable, so too was the reaction. Delegates found themselves blasted as apologists for dictatorship, and with China, Burma, and Iran on the drafting committee, the critics had a point. There was no shortage of defenders, though, and they performed their task loudly and without a trace of irony. Asked about forced labor in his country, U Win Mar, head of the Burmese delegation, replied: "We are proud and honored to do this [work]. . . . If reason prevails, I think there will be a consensus on human rights in Asia, and this is different from the Western idea."

But the important point about the Bangkok Declaration is not that a few thuggish countries would welcome terms designed to mute opposition to their regimes. The important point is that many countries of a more moderate stripe felt it necessary to endorse those terms - indeed, there was no dissent from any of the 49 nations that sent delegates. Apart from their worries that U.S. good intentions may bring about chaos, many see in the push for human rights the new face of protectionism. Although they are wrong to attribute the Clinton Administration's policy to such a crass motive, there is indeed a de facto alliance between human-rights advocates and powerful U.S. vested interests such as organized labor.

It makes it all the more confusing that much of the West's human-rights agenda these days is profoundly anti-Western in many of its key assumptions. When most people hear "human rights," they think of freedom from torture, the right to practice one's religion, the right to a fair trial, and so on. In essence, they think of the civil and political freedoms enshrined in America's Constitution, especially its Bill of Rights. Yet the agenda of the rights community extends far beyond a few limits on government. In fact, in many cases human-rights activists seek to expand government in a way that few save the wealthiest nations could afford. When I put this to the Hong Kong representative of a leading human-rights organization, he gave me the Humpty Dumpty answer: rights mean whatever we want them to mean; they have no fixed definition.

Proliferation of Rights

This, of course, opens the door to all sorts of mischief. Consider the 1948 Universal Declaration on Human Rights, the granddaddy of all such agreements. Much of it echoes the language of America's founding documents, protecting life, liberty, and property. But much of it is warmed-over New Dealism, guaranteeing everything from a "right" to Social Security and leisure to a right to a "free" and "compulsory" education. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. has observed that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights included both `civil and political' rights and `economic, social, and cultural rights,' the second category designed to please the states that denied their subjects the first." Far from establishing a minimal standard of behavior we might expect from civilized nations, the Universal Declaration muddied the waters by broadening "human rights" to include almost anything someone might want.

In recent years these "rights" have multiplied, yielding an International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and another on Economic, Cultural, and Social Rights; the Convention against Torture; the Convention on the Elimination of All Discrimination against Women; the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination; the Convention on the Rights of the Child; the Convention on the Status of Refugees; the Convention on the Non-Applicability of Statutory Limitations to War Crimes and Crimes against Humanity; the ILO Conventions; the UN Declaration of the Rights of Minorities; and the new rights discovered at the 1992 UN Earth Summit in Rio and the 1994 UN Conference on Population and Development in Cairo. Many of the aims endorsed by these documents are unobjectionable as aspirations. But elevated to entitlements, they only encourage the greatest scourge of human rights in the developed world: big government.

Even non-governmental organizations seem to have accepted many of these dubious assumptions about human rights. In Bangkok, while the 49 national delegations were drafting their document, the NGOs offered their own declaration, which would bankrupt and throw into chaos any country foolish enough to try implementing it. Not only does the NGO Declaration call for Asian governments to ratify all the aforementioned coveants and protocols, it calls for the establishment of new international bureaucracies to monitor compliance.

Asian nations have reacted to this anti-growth, anti-development agenda with fury. As usual, Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad of Malaysia has been among the most colorful opposition voices. In January 1992, after several foreigners chained themselves to cranes and barges loading logs in Sarawak, he accused them of "advocating that forest dwellers remain in the forest, eating monkeys and suffering from all kind of diseases." As for the idea that such forests properly belong to mankind, Mahathir noted that four-fifths of the world's greenhouse gases are emitted by developed countries. He said he'd be happy to retain the tropical forests that absorb these gases if the West paid for the service.

Labor rights have provoked even more animosity. Singapore's Goh Chok Tong spoke for many when he excoriated the recent attempts to introduce social clauses on workers' rights and minimum-wage laws into GATT as "betraying the West's fear of competition and its growing sense of economic insecurity." Indian Finance Minister Manmohan Singh - the man responsible for dismantling India's socialist raj - suggests that the focus on rights may be nothing more than an attempt to advance a "new protectionist agenda."

Nor has Asia hesitated to translate its dissent into outright opposition. When the Clinton Administration attempted to maintain a ban on trade with Burma during the most recent gathering of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, it was decisively rebuffed. Since then a parade of ministers has been making its way to Rangoon, beginning with Prime Minister Goh. Then there is China. China has a long way to go before it is worthy of admission to the ranks of civilized nations, but it is at least moving in the right direction by opening up its economy. Yet today China finds itself condemned by the same people who offered only praise at the height of the Cultural Revolution. The switch in attitude suggests that what really bothers the critics is not so much the absence of long-denied civic freedoms as the expansion of economic freedoms.

Dangers Ahead

This year Mr. Clinton comes to Asia with his tail between This legs. But Asian leaders are kidding themselves if they believe that the Clinton Administration's embarrassing retreat on MFN means that the U.S. has suddenly lost its missionary zeal. It is a fact of the American character, and wise is the President who knows how to satisfy these idealistic impulses while advancing U.S. interests (as Nixon pointed out in his last book, it was a balance that Ronald Reagan managed magnificently). The danger today is not that America finds itself at odds with the outlaws of the world. The danger, as the Bangkok Declaration should have made clear, is that a pursuit of abstract rights with little regard for conditions in the affected nations is bound to backfire, as countries with which America has no grievance are forced to close ranks with avowed American enemies to defend themselves.

If our experience with Fascism and Communism taught us anything, it is that the rights most conducive to peace and prosperity are freedoms from government, the sorts of rights that allow independent institutions to thrive. For while mankind's vices are universal, our civilizing influences are particular. And these influences are grounded chiefly in institutions that vary from place to place according to custom and tradition. The weakest link in the old Soviet Bloc was Poland, which benefited from a Roman Catholic Church that had retained its autonomy. The Afghan resistance was bolstered by its strong tribal structure and faith. The Thai monarchy played a stabilizing role during the 1992 bloodshed, and the lively if not totally free press in the Philippines held Marcos accountable even during the worst years.

Asia needs these sorts of institutions, and they are beginning to rise with a growing middle class. In time they will temper Asian governments and foster a sense of genuine community. Against the collective human rights that are so often a part of the international agenda, a right to community rests upon the foundation of private liberty and accountability. The freedom of people to act together, whether through businesses, unions, schools, or churches, goes a long way toward protecting legitimate group interests, without any of the strife that characterizes government attempts to divvy up the pie.

Genuine human rights cannot be legislated or ratified by convention. This is especially true at the international level, where disagreement increases exponentially in relation to the degree of detail sought. But surely we can all tell the difference between South Korea and North Korea, Singapore and Burma, Taiwan and China, Maoist China and Dengist China. An America unable to distinguish between moderately good countries and blatantly bad ones will find itself running up against an unhealthy alliance of the two. Just ask Jimmy.