EUROPSKI MODERNITET I KULTURA LJUDSKIH PRAVA
EUROPEAN MODERNITY AND THE CULTURE OF HUMAN RIGHTS

Summary/Abstract: The thesis that European modernity is being constituted in a dialectical relation with the non-European, both within Europe itself and outside, is argued in this essay in the light of the usual assertion that “human rights” are a “Western concept.” Among the proponents of this thesis on human rights as a western concept are the champions of the superiority of Western culture, or in other words of the moral and political superiority of the West over “other” cultures, but also those who belong to the progressive range of the political spectrum, and who claim that the extension of human rights to the “Third World” is an illegitimate “imposition of Western values.” Both these viewpoints are one-sided. On the one hand, Western theories of rights went hand in hand with Western support for slavery, colonialism and the denial of rights to colonial subjects, while with Europe itself, women and racial, religious and ethnic minories were also denied their rights. On the other hand, it would be fair to claim that the doctrine of rights was not a pure “product of Western imperialism,” but often of the struggle against it. The struggle for rights revealed its true productive nature: every decisive formulation of rights “includes a call for their reformulation” (Lefort). On the lines of Patricia Williams’ doctrine, the essay also draws attention to the need to reformulate the liberal discourse of rights to give a voice to the silenced and disenfranchised while, with reference to Luce Irigaray’s doctrine, the concept of gender rights is considered with a view to developing a culture of gender difference.

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