Trade & human rights: Clinton, China and interdependence.

This column is written in the wake of President Bill Clinton's decision to continue Most Favored Nation (MFN) status for China. Much of the commentary responding to Clinton's decision focuses on the fact that it reverses one of his most visible campaign promises. Since political figures change direction with some regularity, the fixation of the press and policy analysts on the reversal theme, almost to the exclusion of the merits of the case, points to a broader concern. It arises from a review of the China policy along with those toward Bosnia, Somalia, and Haiti. The fear is that there is no central guiding theme in the Clinton policy, no framework within which specific policies are elaborated with attention to diverse cases but with a broader purpose directing specific choices. The Clinton administration's response to this critique is that the state of the world does not allow for a grand design; there is no single unifying threat, so there can be no one integrating principle to guide policy. Fundamentally, the administration's response is sound, but it fails to convince most observers because it seeks to explain too much. Even in the face of a world of multiple, disconnected problems, there is a standard of coherence and consistency demanded of the policy of a major power, a standard which the first eighteen months of the Clinton policy has not yet met.

The best defense of the policy which can be mounted is to stress the administration's argument about complexity and diversity in the world and then to turn to specific issues to show why previous policy perspectives are not adequate for the 1990s. The human rights policy toward China provides the opportunity for such specific analysis. My own reaction to the Clinton decision on MFN is to judge it at two levels. First, the merits of the specific decision. Given the multiple objectives of U.S. policy toward China, I find the continuation of MFN status defensible, but I would have imposed more stringent costs, through multilateral and bilateral policies, for the lack of any Chinese progress on central human rights issues like freedom of religion. Moreover, while it is wise to move away from the rigid review formula which produced the 1993-94 policy quandary, Clinton did not provide an alternative framework for review of Chinese policy on human rights. Briefly, the basic decision can be defended, but the policy framework lacks specific constraints and criteria for future judgments.

Second, the China case can be looked at as an example of the changing context in which a human rights policy must be elaborated. This argument requires a broader review, essentially distinguishing three stages of human rights policy that have now produced the issues of the 1990s.

The first stage runs from the late 1940s through the 1960s. This is the "UN stage" of human rights policy. At the heart of this period is the promulgation of what Professor Louis Henkin called the "UN Bill of Human Rights," consisting of the UN Declaration of Human Rights and the subsequent covenants and conventions which specify the Declaration's meaning. The essential contribution of these texts is that they cracked the shell of state sovereignty, transforming human rights violations from the realm of "domestic jurisdiction" to a concern and responsibility of the international community of states. This move established a fault line in world politics, although the implications of the move were not visible for the next twenty-five years; indeed, the full meaning of this international responsibility for human rights will only become visible in this decade. The reason for the delayed reaction is that the onset of the cold war in the late 1940s smothered the UN role on human rights. The ideological struggle of the superpowers pervaded every dimension of world politics. The UN documents themselves became a point of contention as the West defended "political-civil rights" and the East argued that real rights were "socioeconomic."

With the UN agencies paralyzed on human rights, possibilities for implementing a human rights policy moved to individual states. The second stage of the human rights story runs from the 1970s through the end of the cold war. The U.S. debate about human rights, catalyzed by the Congress with its human rights legislation of 1973-74, and then pressed with new authority by the Carter presidency, established the basis for the U.S. policy debate. If anything, the human rights policy of the 1970s showed the complexity of trying to move beyond the fault line of stressing international responsibility for human rights to shaping specific choices of a state. It was, however, cold-war complexity, something quite different from the issues confronting the Clinton policy of the 1990s. During the Carter-Reagan-Bush years, the framework for the human rights debate was the relationship between human rights and security issues. The structure of the argument was set by the legislation of the 1970s, requiring a review of human rights for all countries receiving U.S. military or economic assistance. The debate was about U.S. bilateral relations with "allies," all of whom were somehow regarded as important in the struggle against communism. The trade-offs in the policy debate (about Korea, Iran, Brazil, Chile, El Salvador) were how far one could press human rights claims without eroding U.S. "security interests." The Carter policy was both new and controversial because it pressed human rights issues; the first-term Reagan policy gave clear primacy to security claims; the later Reagan policy, under pressure, found human rights more useful in the Philippines and Korea. But this whole structure of argument collapsed with the end of the cold war.

The third stage of the human rights debate, the world of the 1990s, has neither the passion nor the relative simplicity of the "rights-security" debates of the previous twenty years. Neither Jimmy Carter's policy nor Ronald Reagan's view of the world provides much guidance on the new terrain.

The decision which Bill Clinton faced on China exemplifies the problems of the third stage of human rights policy. The predominant tension of the policy was not about security issues, but the logic of economic interdependence. The United States does not (at the moment) face a security threat from China, but a negative MFN decision would "cost" U.S. jobs and export opportunities. The Chinese "threat" is embodied in the mutual gains the two economies seek from each other. Security issues are debated in terms of polarities (us vs. them); interdependence issues are debated in terms of linkage (us and them). Linkage issues do not dissolve matters of principle; central to the China debate is precisely how human rights are to be weighed in relationship to economic issues. But the dynamic of the debate is less that of standing against a threat than relating to multiple objectives which do not fit nicely together.

The multiple objectives, moreover, fit into a multilateral framework. The rights-security debate was overwhelmingly bilateral. Today, the U.S.-China policy agenda mixes human rights and trade policy with nuclear proliferation issues and the role China plays at the United Nations. Security issues are on the table but in a framework of multilateral collaboration. The logic of interdependence pervades both economic and security issues.

In many ways the new context for human rights policy is less conflicted and less dangerous than the pattern of cold-war politics. But the clarity which danger and threat bring to thinking about security policy is replaced today by the interlocking possibilities and needs that interdependence creates. The MFN decision of the Clinton administration is open to the charge that rights claims did not receive enough weight; but the president and his advisers are correct when they point out that it is the whole framework and fabric of rights policy which must be rethought in order to preserve both moral principle and multiple interests in the conditions of interdependence.