The recent international human rights conference in Vienna was like a reprise of the Cold War in at least one respect. Once again, we heard some nations advancing the old line that democracy and democratic ideals are cultural and Western.
According to this line, the people in other parts of the world really don't care about having freedom of speech and a free press or about being able to choose their leaders in free elections and join whatever organizations they please. They are more interested in raising their standard of living. Insisting on democracy will impede this, and those who say democracy must be a priority are just showing how ethnocentric they are.
You'd think that the collapse of the Soviet bloc and the student uprising in Tiananmen Square, presided over by the statue of the "Goddess Liberty," would have revealed the flimsiness of this argument. Nevertheless, it continues to be advanced.
A recent collection edited by Diane Ravitch and Abigail Thernstrom reminds us of how universal the desire for freedom is. "The Democracy Reader" (New York: Harper Collins, 1992) includes writings on democracy and freedom all the way from Plato, John Milton and the Massachusetts Slave Petition to modern times.
In answer to the argument that most people want food and shelter rather than freedom, Sidney Hook, writing at the beginning of World War II, talks about the fallacy of the choice between bread and freedom:
The profoundest lesson of our era is the fact that without political freedom there can be no other freedoms, but only an uncertain and uneasy exercise of privileges which may be terminated abruptly without anybody's having to account to those who are affected by these decisions. There are writings by Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Andrei Sakharov and Vaclav Havel. Helmut Frauendorfer, a Romanian who fled his country in 1988, describes the life of ordinary people under Ceausescu --without freedom and civil or human liberties. Octavio Paz and Mario Vargas Llosa talk about the importance of democracy for the future of Latin America. And in "The Fifth Modernization," Wei Jingsheng, a Chinese writer and editor who has been in jail since 1979, says his country will not be able to achieve necessary modernizations in industry, agriculture or other sectors of society without the "fifth modernization," democracy. Wei sees democracy as a system of self-criticism, adjustment and renewal, and without it, he believes, the other modernizations will never succeed.
One of the most moving answers to the shallow and self-serving arguments of governments that deny the universality of the desire for freedom and democracy comes from Chinese scientist Fang Lizhe. Fang, who took refuge in the American Embassy during the uprising in Tiananmen Square and now lives in the U.S., wrote this when he was given the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award in 1989: Chinese people are no different from any other. Like all members of the human race, the Chinese are born with a body and a brain, with passions and with a soul. Therefore, they can and must enjoy the same inalienable rights, dignity and liberty as other human beings ....
Recent propaganda to the effect that "China has its own standards for human rights" bears an uncanny similarity to pronouncements made by our 18th century rulers when they declared that "China has its own astronomy." The feudal aristocracy of 200 years ago opposed the notion of an astronomy based on science. They refused to acknowledge the universal applicability of modern astronomy, or even that it might be of some use in formulating the Chinese calendar. The reason ... was that the laws of astronomy, which pertain everywhere, made it quite clear that the "divine right to rule" claimed by these people was a fiction. By the same token, the principles of human rights, which also pertain everywhere, make it clear that the "right to rule" claimed by some today is just as baseless. That is why rulers from every era, with their special privileges, have opposed the equality inherent in such universal ideas ....
In the field of modern cosmology, the first principle is called "the Cosmological Principle." It says that the universe has no center, that it has the same properties throughout. Every place in the universe has, in this sense, equal rights. How can the human race, which has evolved in a universe of such fundamental equality, fail to strive for a society without violence and terror? How can we fail to build a world in which the rights due to every human being from birth are respected?