The postwar universal human rights regime depended on American hegemony for its relevance

Evidence

“The international human rights regime of 1945,” an American human rights supporter remarked, “is no more. American hegemony has eroded. Europe, even with the events of 1992, is little more than a peninsula. The world is now as Arab, Asian, and African, as it is Western. Today the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenants are less relevant to much of the planet than during the immediate post-World War II era.” — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 524

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that a ‘universal’ moral regime’s relevance tracks one civilization’s power is a genuinely unsettling, paradigm-shifting observation about the relationship between norms and hegemony — worth sitting with.
• QUESTION: If universality of human rights tracks Western power, what happens to norms that genuinely did spread and get internalized (abolition, women’s suffrage)? Does the framework overclaim?
• XREF: connects to: US Cold War anti-communism reshaped the drafting of social and economic rights — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 190