ABSTRACT
The aim of this chapter is twofold. It seeks first to identify the consistencies in which the language of human rights has featured in the official foreign policy narrative expressed by the Bush Administrations and second to consider the relative merits of three differing interpretations of the resultant hegemonic discourse. The chapter is split into two sections. The first defines the hegemonic discourse in terms of three internally consistent messages or rules, (i) that human rights are impartially promoted as independent foreign policy goals; (ii) that rule one is derived from a pre-existing US identity; and (iii) that championing human rights complements distinct foreign policy goals of freedom, justice and democracy promotion.
