Asia, Europe and human rights: From confrontation to dialogue?

The new, so‐called ‘ethical’ foreign policy of the UK Government places the promotion of human rights at its heart, and emphasizes multilateral and especially European action as a key strategy for its implementation. The recent Asia‐Europe Meeting in London (ASEM‐2) was dominated by consideration of the East Asian financial crisis, and human rights issues appear to have been marginalized. This suggests that parallel Asia‐Europe NGO dialogue may play an important role in redressing the balance in favour of popular interests. The paper argues, however, that such an intercultural dialogue on human rights, though extremely welcome, should be informed by clear thinking about the relation between the idea of universal human rights and the claims of particular cultures. This requires an engagement with the ‘Asian values’ debate. In this connection, the paper argues that the first, crudely polemical phase of this debate has been superseded by much more refined ‘new Asian thinking’ about human rights and Asian culture. An important intellectual space has been created for productive dialogue between East Asian and Western human rights advocates. Just as the Asia‐Europe economic dialogue supplements that between East Asia and the USA, so Europe can supplement the political and intellectual role of the USA in the human rights dialogue with East Asia with distinctive contributions of its own.