Resistance to Hegemony Within the United Nations: The 1993 Vienna Conference, Human Rights, and Cultural Relativism.

Cultural debates gained dramatic ground in the UN context at the start of the 1990s. During the Cold War and decolonization eras, ideological and economic concerns characterized much of the contentious discourse across the UN agenda. Peace and security, economic and social cooperation, and human rights were interpreted through the ideological lens of the East-West rivalry or through the anti-colonial perspective of the newly independent states. In the 1990s, the UN as an institution was no longer riven by the superpower standoff. The growing success of the Asian tigers foreshadowed the Washington consensus in the development debates and undercut some of the core elements of the dependency school that had been, until that time, the most important resistance to hegemony in global governance. What replaced these two organizing discourses was a new focus on culture and cultural relativism that created new types of resistance to the hegemony of the West within UN politics. Perhaps the earliest intimation of the new culture wars occurred in 1993 at the 2nd World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna. There, long-held assumptions about universally shared norms of human rights were called into question as the Bangkok Declaration stated that culturally divergent regions and nations had the right to interpret human rights norms in light of cultural differences. This paper will utilize the conference as a means to explore how the human rights discourse is used to challenge the dominant, hegemonic conception of human rights which is essentially liberal, individualistic, and universal. This paper argues that the primary means of hegemonic resistance within the UN system rests upon these cultural foundations rather than material, economic or ideological grounds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]