ABSTRACT
The tension between the norms of universal justice created by the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights and the principle of independent and sovereign nations defined by controlled borders and established cultures is pervasive in human rights scholarship. While most of the scholarship has focused on ways in which the tension can be resolved or at least mitigated, this chapter focuses on processes through which this tension is sustained to examine inherent limits of universal human rights in a world of states. First I argue against the idea that the diversity of cultural values across the world is the paradigmatic obstacle to universally claimed and enjoyed human rights. On my account a) a conception of cross-cultural dialogue as a dialogue that presupposes differences but aims at understanding rather than agreement makes possible the resolution of the so-called insurmountable cultural differences and b) an understanding of the prevalence of processes of “cross-cultural contamination” (the interaction of different cultural systems) across the world makes cultural dialogue, both across cultures and within cultures, necessary. Second, I argue that the creation of imagined strangers central to the current conception of citizenship (the only valid and valuable form of political and legal membership, in modern liberal democracies) coupled with the assumption that members of a citizenry have, and organize their lives around, shared values constitute a crucial obstacle to the universal enjoyment of human rights. Last, I argue that the state-centric approach to international human rights discourse and instrument is an inherent limit to the universal enjoyment of these rights, and a more significant obstacle than cultural differences, to the universality of human rights.
