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26 Donnelly on Human Rights and Asian Values

26 Donnelly on Human Rights and Asian Values

Jack Donnelly, Universal Human Rights in Theory and Practice, Third Edition (Cornell University Press, 2013)

5. Human Rights and Asian Values

Asian values are not frozen in an ancient past. They are no less dynamic than Western values–or values anywhere else in the modern world. We must be particularly careful not to confuse what people can be forced to acquiesce to with what they value.

It is possible that forms of politics that differ substantially from Western liberal democracy will be chosen freely by Asian peoples. I am skeptical, and  certainly we have seen nothing like that yet. Singapore, which has evolved into a surprisingly liberal semi-democracy, is perhaps closest to a stable viable alternative, but the gap   between Singaporean and Western practices is rather rapidly declining. Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong strongly suggest that where Asians are freely given the choice, they choose human rights no less than those in other parts of the world.

That does not mean that the details will not have distinctive Asian features. (Recall the discussion in sections 6.3 and 7.2 of universality in human rights concepts but substantial particularity in their implementation.) For example, Confucian housing and welfare policy might have quite distinctive characteristics and Asian notions of public propriety might lead to systematically different patterns in the exercise of freedom of speech. However, fundamental concepts of human rights, it seems to me, are and ought to be largely the same in East and West.

As we saw in chapters 5 and 8, human rights did not come to the West easily, let alone naturally, and they came only very late. But Westerners have learned to reshape their values and practices around new ideas of human rights and human dignity. Indians have as well, as we will see in the next
chapter. Th e same argument can be made for Africans and, especially, Latin Americans. I would make it for the Muslim world as well. It also seems to me that East and Southeast Asians, in Confucianism, Daoism, Buddhism, Islam, and traditions of more local provenance, have more than enough indigenous resources to draw on in coming to embrace human rights as they grapple with building lives of dignity in the face of the distinctive opportunities and threats posed by modern states and modern markets.






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