From Emancipation to Transcendence? Dignity, Catholicism, and the Changing Imageries of Humanity in Post-War Europe

Abstract

The idea of "human dignity" is easily one of the central values in post-war political thought and discourse. Faith "in the dignity and worth of the human person" features prominently in almost all global and regional human rights documents -from the Charter of the United Nations of 1945 and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 (UDHR) to the United Nations Human Rights Covenants of 1966, and from the American Convention on Human Rights of 1969 to the Helsinki Final Act of 1975. 1 Dignity also features prominently in many contemporary constitutions -from the post-war West German and Italian to the South African or Polish constitutions of 1996 and 1997 respectively. Even military interventions are undertaken in the name of human dignity. Because of NATO's intervention in the war in Kosovo, US President Bill Clinton said in 1999, "the twentieth century is ending […] with a hopeful affirmation of human dignity and human rights for the twenty-first century". 2 State sovereignty, the International Commission on Sovereignty and State Intervention wrote in 2001, entailed not only rights, but also a state's responsibility to protect "the dignity and basic rights of all the people within the state", and if it failed to provide this protection, "responsibility to protect" fell to the international community. 3 Both supporters and opponents 1 The quotation is from the preamble to the UN Charter.