Political Languages of Human Rights

Dissidents are often seen as central to this triumph of liberalism. The lecture challenges these assumptions. The liberal human rights discourse was only marginal in East Central European dissent before 1989. We need to understand the fundamental plurality of political and cultural languages (socialist, liberal, republican, Christian, nationalist) of human rights among dissidents as an essential factor shaping political developments and the post-dissident politics of rights in the region after 1989. Understanding the historical complexity helps to understand some central aspects of political dynamics in the region, which have recently become one of the significant sites of culture wars and the global struggle over the democratic imagination in the Western world.