Where Do Rights Come From?

I recently started my second semester at Boğaziçi University, and this term I have classes that are narrowly targeted to my interest in global development. One such class is the Politics of Developing Countries. In our second week, one of the articles I read was Charles Tilly’s “Where Do Rights Come From?” Of the two dozen or so articles I’ve read through the first weeks of school, this gets my prizes for least painful reading experience and most provocative content.

Charles Tilly (1929-2008), an American Ivy-League professor, argues in his essay that civil, political, and social rights developed in Europe as a result of international and intra-national struggle. Tilly explains that the pre-18^th century preference of European regimes to use mercenaries was becoming increasingly expensive and unreliable in the 1700s, necessitating the conscription of national militaries. However, using a nationally conscripted military carries several problems to a society: able-bodied men are removed from the economy; fathers and husbands leave their families for long and uncertain amounts of time; and a new layer of taxes has to be permanently levied on the population. With all these drawbacks, it’s obvious why empires (including mine) have opted to use mercenaries when possible.

To assuage unrest from new taxes and divided families, rulers needed a carrot for the population—like rights. According to Tilly, rulers negotiated away political rights and freedoms to keep the populace cooperative.

A significant variable in each country was the sector of society with which rulers negotiated. If rulers only had to bargain with feudal lords or large landowners to get their peasantry to fight, then those lords would gain increased liberties, but the public at large would remain fairly repressed—Russia is an example. In Sweden, by contrast, rulers bargained at the village level, forcing them to confer more rights unto the population than other European states did.

In this way, he argues, citizens’ rights resulted from—of all things—war.

Written in between the lines of this essay is a centuries-old conflict of paradigms—society evolving as a result of class struggle versus society progressing through the evolution of ideas. Of course, I was raised to understand that rights were the natural product of the Enlightenment and the natural rights philosophers.

If we take Tilly’s argument as true, then we should accept that the effects of these negotiations three hundred years ago have been extraordinarily persistent. For example, people in Scandinavian countries—where rulers had to bargain with village elders rather than regional lords—continue to be the most free in the world. In The Economist’s 2008 Democracy Index, the six most democratic countries were Sweden, Norway, Iceland, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Finland.

Likewise, if Russia’s slow expansion of rights is the result of the ability of rulers to “coopt well-established regional power holders,” rather than a generic cultural temperament, it also continues today. Indeed, Russian leaders Dmitri Medvedev and Vldimir Putin each have approval ratings around 70% even though 95% of Russians feel they don’t have a say in their country’s policies. Perhaps that’s because 43% say the country should be ruled with an “iron fist.” This could all be the legacy of how Russia militarized, or it could be a reflection of something deeper and longer lasting within Russian culture. Further still it could be Russia’s geographic distance from the Enlightenment.

Ultimately, proving the point one way or the other is difficult. But while Tilly effectively makes a case that the creation of national militaries could have led to the empowerment of Europe’s citizenries, I don’t see an argument for why it couldn’t have been a result of Enlightenment thinking, or some combination of the two.

I think we can see how Tilly’s thesis could be flawed by taking a look at the devolution of civil and social rights to African Americans in the United States. Imagine being a historian two hundred years from now explaining the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. It actually makes a lot of sense, sitting at the desk of this future-historian, to look at the 1960s and see that two decades earlier African Americans fought and died in World War II just as white Americans did. This contribution to society would have given African Americans some bargaining power to attain equal social rights. Particularly on the eve of a new war in Vietnam, the rulers of the United States could no longer withhold rights from a major part of their conscripted military force without creating massive unrest within the society—our cause and effect is impressive, no?

However, such a view excludes more than a hundred years of ideological and economic progress that preceded the Civil Rights Movement, all the way from abolitionism to the Great Migration and the assimilation of African Americans in northern cities.

From my view it would seem that the Civil Rights Movement was a significant achievement resulting from centuries of cultural transformation and internal struggle, a transformation that was influenced—but not caused—by the presence of African Americans in the United States’ conscripted military.

Admittedly, I have done much less in my effort to contradict Charles Tilly than he did to argue his thesis in the first place. Nevertheless, my sense of history tells me that the devolution of civil, political, and social rights in Europe was probably—like the American Civil Rights Movement—a larger cultural process that also included intra-state power struggles.