1. Situating the NIEO, the right to development and other creative openings

With his long lens and intersecting historical trajectories, Moyn makes some illuminating claims that demonstrate just how cynically human rights were directed to serving the capitalist interests of influential states. Top among his insightful suggestions is that the effect of the turn to global poverty and linking that effort to ‘globalizing social rights’ in the 1970s was a deliberate attempt (by the World Bank and Western states) to ‘ethically outflank’ the more ambitious and egalitarian global equality goals of the NIEO. He describes a meeting in Belgrade of the foreign ministers of the non-aligned movement in the summer of 1978 where they ‘voiced a nearly universal suspicion of the sudden interest in the basic needs of individuals’.Footnote ² Moyn makes much of the NIEO’s claims for equality and not sufficiency, the programme’s important effort to achieve what Johanna Bockman refers to in her salient account as ‘socialist globalization’,Footnote ³ and especially the supplanting of the NIEO by a call from the powerful for a ‘basic needs’ approach within the unruly countries of the South, which was but one step away from saying ‘human rights at home before global justice abroad’. But there are a number of elements to highlight here. First, despite the NIEO’s undoubted significance in seeking to challenge inequality among states and to redirect international economic governance towards distributional equity and fairness, the epic terms reserved for its redistributive agenda overlook compelling critiques as to its revolutionary claims. Not least, with its ‘catching up’ rationale, the NIEO could only ever institute the very exploitative nature of the world economy which its advocates condemned.Footnote ⁴ It is a reasonable proposition that, had the NIEO been successful, it would in any case have served to reinforce the neoliberal world economy that Moyn’s book contests.

Second, the NIEO was not ‘poles apart from the human rights movement’ in its demands for equality,Footnote ⁵ if we are prepared to take seriously the normative legitimacy of the Declaration on the Right to Development (DRD), as well as treaty provisions on obligations of international co-operation. The 1986 DRD provided the groundwork for bringing human rights to bear on the conventional understanding of development and served as an ally in the early evolution of obligations of international co-operation under the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights when the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (CESCR) delineated the nature of states parties’ obligations back in 1990, in the very first years of its work.Footnote ⁶ In emphasizing the importance of the international setting to the realization of socio-economic rights, the CESCR shifted the focus of the problem away from scarcity and placed greater importance instead on the question of distribution.Footnote ⁷ Yet demands for global economic justice are still a point of high political tension as the North focuses on human rights within the countries of the South in the interminable discussions on the right to development at the UN. The point is that the ‘diversion’ from international redistribution that the basic needs and then human rights agendas may have created could have been otherwise, had the machinations of political economy made the space for it. Samuel Moyn recognizes the significance of the DRD to his account noting that ‘easily the most prominent attempt to retain some optic on global fairness in the neoliberal age was the so-called right to development’. He concludes, however, that the right to development was ‘the exception proving the rule, global inequality simply went missing from human rights politics in a neoliberal age’.Footnote ⁸ But with its focus on global structural disadvantage the right to development was made to all but disappear, and on precisely the same terms that killed the NIEO.

Third, and notably, the right to development is a peoples’ right and like its more famous counterpart that was included in treaty law in 1966, the right of self-determination, it is a right that transcends in its internal dimension the deceptive atomism at the heart of the liberal defence of individual rights when those rights are positioned to exclude collective rights. While collective rights have their detractors – most prominently the UK, a position it reaffirmed recently during the 2018 adoption by the Human Rights Council of the Declaration on the Rights of Peasants – the Peasants’ Declaration is rife with collective resource rights directed at equalities. These include rights to land, water, and traditional knowledge, just as the quest for self-determination by indigenous peoples qua a peoples’ right, affirmed in the 2007 UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, demonstrates how that right is not only about participation and political status but also about access to and control over resources, including lands and waters. Control over resources is a core dimension of international human rights and one hard fought for by social movements for decades in an effort at material and spiritual equality. The failure to see collective norms of redistribution ‘globalized’ is an important part of the human rights account, but it is not the whole story.

2. Contribution by mainstream human rights towards equality – and its limits

In tackling inequalities, human rights have proven to be more momentous than Moyn appears to acknowledge. He states that human rights have delivered when it comes to ‘status equality’ but failed when it comes to ‘material fairness’.Footnote ⁹ But to draw a sharp dividing line between the two is to miss how the move in human rights law from formal equality to substantive equality (a move fought for by social movements) has worked to redress material inequality. Human rights norms have come to be understood as comprising not only non-discrimination but also a positive right to equality, and not only formal equality but also substantive equality, i.e., equality of outcomes (Moyn does a good job of demonstrating how social movements have transformed the language and agenda of human rights to include women’s rights). Even under the comparatively speaking old-fashioned European Convention on Human Rights, treating persons identically despite meaningful differences in their situation has been treated as prohibited,Footnote ¹⁰ and so have unequal outcomes resulting from allegedly neutral processes.Footnote ¹¹ Amongst human rights treaties, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights goes much further in declaring a self-standing right to equality. While, as such, applicable to the socio-economic domain, the provision has so far delivered more towards outlawing exclusionsFootnote ¹² – i.e., ‘status equality’ or access to socio-economic goods – than in addressing substantive inequality or the amount of those goods. Still, at least some of the cases also contain that dimension, including a case about pension levels for Senegalese soldiers who had served in the French army.Footnote ¹³ Inequalities can be addressed through human rights law but admittedly only when an arguable claim is made in respect of either the different treatment of two individuals or categories of persons that are in some sense comparators (this resulting in a broad understanding of discrimination) or, alternatively, the existence of some kind of conduct (action or inaction) by a state (resulting in a broad understanding of equality ‘before the law’). Notably, the early and consistent commitment in international human rights law to addressing discrimination has also led to an explicit prohibition today of discrimination on the grounds of property and lack thereof and discrimination on the basis of one’s economic and social situation.

Scholars of human rights law should not have a problem in acknowledging that what human rights have done and can ever do is ‘not enough’ in the sense that they alone would fix, or provide all the tools needed to fix, the world and its injustices and inequalities. The tougher questions are whether human rights are doing ‘enough’ by doing their fair share without posing a false claim of being a panacea, or indeed whether they inadvertently work against their own objectives, for example, by blindly endorsing economic growth to achieve national redistributionFootnote ¹⁴ or by inadvertently co-conspiring with capitalism’s voracious tendencies in other ways.Footnote ¹⁵ Samuel Moyn has a point when claiming that, first, a disproportionate focus on civil and political rights by the human rights movement and, later, the focus on a ‘minimum core’ of economic and social rights (instead of ceilings or material equality) may have been choices that brought about the risk of human rights becoming a ‘powerless companion’ to neoliberalism. But there has been internal contestation over those choices amongst human rights scholars, actors and social rights institutions that have plodded along in their efforts at a thick form of redistribution. For example, out of the limelight, the European Committee of Social Rights has, over several decades, gradually been building case law and institutionalizing lines of interpretation in order to operationalize the (intentionally) weak and ambiguous provisions of the 1961 European Social Charter, including by addressing actual levels of benefits. Human rights are one important tool of empowerment, and they are one important yardstick for measuring the fairness of outcomes. Their weaknesses relate to the frequent individual-centred nature of human rights claims, the oft-implausible ‘victim’ requirement, and the barriers that characterize the domain of litigation. And while law may be considered a closed system, international human rights law is in significant ways open to the preferences expressed through political and economic power. For structural social change to occur, human rights, particularly when mobilized through the international juridical apparatus, are certainly ‘not enough’ but pursuing them can be a strategic choice of consequence for a lawyer, social movement activist or politician who wants to make the world better for people in a vulnerable position, or even the national or global population at large.

In his Conclusion Samuel Moyn introduces King Croesus who owns everything and creates a protection floor for all his subjects and not only to secure the upkeep of his global estate. Hence, even the worst off ‘have enough’ even if they live far below those who have more. Moyn’s verdict is that ‘[n]othing in the scheme of human rights rules out Croesus’s world’.Footnote ¹⁶ This is not a categorical truth, and we can see also how civil and political rights form part of the capacity of human rights to deliver towards material equality. In addition to ‘status equality’, human rights include the right to organize, freedom of expression and even a right to democracy that can be derived from the individual right to participate in public affairs and the collective right of peoples to self-determination. Here human rights provide some important tools of empowerment so as to open up a reasonable prospect of claiming redistribution.Footnote ¹⁷

3. International human rights law in (another) context

The book’s coverage of how the institutions of development and trade neglected human rights even as they sought to turn away from overt neoliberal policies points to a matter that should be acknowledged: the place of human rights law vis-à-vis international law. True, in large part, international financial institutions have not meaningfully taken on board human rights despite the devastating social impact of their structural adjustment policies on the global South and most recently in Southern Europe because they do not have to. And they do not have to for two central reasons. First, because the toothless chastisement by international human rights law has had the result that states as members of those organizations need not ensure their human rights obligations are reflected in decisions made by the organizations. And second, the outmoded laws that govern those international organizations have the effect of preventing individuals from holding the organizations to account. This is due, on the one hand, to the lack of available judicial forums, and, on the other hand, to the existence of procedural obstacles such as those resulting from the immunity of organizations before domestic courts. International organizations have effectively converted the immunity that was put in place primarily to shield them from interference by member states ‘into a sword’ with which they can ward off attempts by individuals to hold them accountable for their actions.Footnote ¹⁸ The truth is that these are not so much matters of human rights but of politics, including the influence of orthodox economic assumptions in political decision-making and law-making. To remark that human rights ‘coexisted with a new political economy of hierarchy that they did not disturb’Footnote ¹⁹ is a point worth making but does not say enough given that that is precisely how powerful states wanted it. While Moyn notes in his Preface that human rights are essential even if not enough, those who say they are ‘not enough’ have a certain duty to reveal what better choices would be available.

This book is impressive in both its scope and in its concision but at times one has to wonder if it is too concise to offer a nuanced picture. Samuel Moyn displays a vast and varied knowledge base, a sharp analytical mind, and an ability to weave together events to paint a bigger picture, a skill perhaps unique to historians that he marshals brilliantly. But excellent research and ability notwithstanding, the best way to learn from Not Enough is to take it as one step, but not the only or the last one, in the study of human rights as a protean project. To say, as Moyn does, that ‘human rights had no commitment on their own to material equality’Footnote ²⁰ can be contested but it is an immensely important and overdue case to have made. Rightly so, this book is sure to galvanize scrutiny of international human rights law with an eye to its weak spots and any prospect of institutionalizing a global welfare structure. Not least in that regard Not Enough will surely make a unique impact – and that is more than enough.