ABSTRACT
The distinction between the traditional Machiavellian ethics of statecraft and a more cosmopolitan ethic is an important one for the discussion. The promotion of human rights to the agenda of international politics is part of an effort at moving beyond Machiavellian statecraft. In the field of human rights, however, legalization is indispensable. It is the prerequisite to the empirical efficacy of moral obligations; it makes it possible for this sense of moral duty to have political effects. The Leninist-Stalinist model has led to the most extensive violations of human rights whenever the national circumstances approximated those of a civil war. As in the case of the Leninist-Stalinist regimes, these violations are most brutal when the opposition has been able to organize an insurgency and conditions of quasi-civil war exist, as, for instance, despite a facade of elections, in El Salvador, and also in Guatemala.
