Activists now talk of a "crisis" in human rights, with many democracies wavering in their support for universal freedoms.

Earlier this year the United States withdrew from the UN Human Rights Council and shortly thereafter severed all ties with the International Criminal Court; while the increasingly authoritarian governments of other democracies like Turkey, Hungary and the Philippines are now routinely accused of violations.

While some blame a rise in nationalist sentiment and distrust of globalisation, an increasing number of historians argue it's time to reassess our understanding of the history of human rights.

International support for individual freedoms, they argue, was never as strong as many social progressives believe.

A false start

It's widely accepted that the modern human rights agenda began as a response to the horrors of the Nazi death camps and found written expression in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, proclaimed by the United Nations in 1948.

That document defined human rights in 30 articles, including the right to life itself, and a life free of slavery, torture and arbitrary arrest.

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Yale University's Samuel Moyn disputes that narrative.

At the end of World War II the general public in Allied countries understood the evils of National Socialism, he argues, but had little understanding of the true scale of Jewish suffering — what we now call the Holocaust.

"I think when we wanted human rights to back our concern about atrocity abroad, we may have pretended that the Holocaust was the reason why human rights exist, and that's just not true," he says.

"It doesn't demean the Universal Declaration to say that it was a response to other things, other evils."

Eleanor Roosevelt, who chaired the UN Human Rights Commission in the late 1940s, equated the Declaration with the Magna Carta.

"We stand today at the threshold of a great event," she told the UN General Assembly, "both in the life of the United Nations and in the life of mankind".

Eleanor Roosevelt holds the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, in November 1949. ( Wikimedia Commons )

But Professor Moyn says ordinary workers at the time saw the declaration differently.

"Coming out of World War Two, lots of citizens wanted a new deal that protected the social dimensions of citizenship. That is why the Universal Declaration has these economic and social rights," he says.

"What I don't think it was really about was establishing new kinds of protection globally."

The declaration was hindered in its scope and effectiveness by a lack of legislative authority. Its articles carried no legal weight, they were simply ideals.

And, while inspiring in their rhetoric, the real groundswell in the post-war global environment was for "self-determination", Professor Moyn says, not universal rights.

"If you looked around at the movements on the ground, and especially at the anticolonial leaders, none of them really said that empire was a human rights violation. What they said is that peoples deserve a liberation," he says.

"What the Universal Declaration did not promise was self-rule, so the peoples of the world rejected the consolation prize and set out to get their sovereignty anyway. That's how decolonisation took place."

The difficulty with soaring rhetoric

The wording of the declaration also proved problematic, says Colgate University's Jenna Reinbold.

In trying to find a language that wasn't culturally specific, the framers of the declaration eventually settled on a style that assumed, rather than reflected, universal acceptance.

The end result, says Associate Professor Reinbold, was an avowedly secular document that carried a curiously religious tone and logic.

This created a core tension within the document.

"They understood the declaration to be a kind of moral project rather than a strictly legal or political project," Associate Professor Reinbold says.

"They talked about 'sacredness' and 'veneration'. They had ideas about a sort of metaphysical trajectory that humans were on and that the declaration was enabling that in some way.

"They frequently used the term 'moral value' or a kind of morality to describe what it is that they were doing."

But the end result, she says, limited the appeal of universal freedoms during much of the Cold War/post-colonial period.

American guilt and a quest for renewed moral authority

The real embrace of the modern human rights agenda came in the mid-1970s, according to Professor Moyn, as part of an American-led search for higher purpose.

"People got depressed with socialism and were looking for a different kind of cause," he says.

Decolonisation was also seen to be going wrong.

"People tolerated the collective liberation of peoples from the old empires, and even the violence that had been required for decolonisation, but then they saw so many despotisms rather than democracy around the world, and they said someone has to stand up for individual rights in the post-colonial states," Professor Moyn says.

The declaration includes the right to life, liberty and security of person. ( Getty: Fabrice Coffrini )

In 1977, newly-elected US president Jimmy Carter explicitly adopted the promotion of universal human rights as a central tenet of his administration's foreign policy.

"Once the United States had said that it was important, other nations followed suit," says Melbourne University's Barbara Keys.

"It became quite a popular idea and a standard part of foreign policy that you had to take into consideration human rights issues in the countries you were dealing with."

Associate Professor Keys says America was looking for an effective moral language in the wake of Watergate and the Vietnam War.

They were seeking to restore faith in their country's "essential benevolence".

"[Americans] believed their country had a unique moral mission, and that belief cracked in the Vietnam War years and human rights became a way to reconstruct that belief," Associate Professor Keys says.

As a result, she says, human rights were embraced as a political tool by both the left and right.

"Conservatives were actually the first to pick up on this new moral framing for foreign policy. They started talking about human rights in the context of Jewish emigration from the Soviet Union," she says.

That meant using human rights to target America's long-time communist enemy.

Liberals, by contrast, had different moral concerns.

"They felt that America was partly responsible for the human rights abuses that America's allies were committing, so they condemned torture and political imprisonment and other abuses by American allies," Associate Professor Keys says.

"For them it was about making their side stronger and more morally fit."

Jimmy Carter made universal human rights a central tenet of his administration's foreign policy. ( Jimmy Carter Library/CC-BY-2.0 )

But when America itself was criticised for inconsistencies, and for supporting oppressive regimes in the Middle East and Latin America, left-leaning liberals once again became disillusioned.

"The Carter administration, especially in its last year, tried hard to figure out what good their new human rights emphasis had done," Associate Professor Keys says.

"And the main area of success that they identified was really in the psychological realm, the restoration of pride and confidence. They found it a lot harder to point to successes in lessening human rights abuses."

And Republicans also lost interest, increasingly fearing the Carter administration's foreign policy agenda was an impediment to American strategic interests.

Associate Professor Keys says human rights then had another boom period in the early 1990s, in the aftermath of the Cold War.

"There was no more communism to fight. The world needed some kind of moral rallying cry and human rights was the easiest one," she says.

By the beginning of the new century, however, human rights had once again lost their political cache.

"Because it proved so easy to co-opt human rights rhetoric in 2003 when the administration of George W Bush used human rights language to justify going to war in Iraq, or [as] part of its justification, there was a growing sense of disillusionment and a stepping away from human rights language by the Obama administration," she says.

"And now of course Trump is pretty much flatly rejecting it."

Human rights group Amnesty International protests against Donald Trump's visit to the United Kingdom. ( Getty: Chris J Ratcliffe )

An increasingly fierce competition between values

So, does the modern human rights ideal and agenda have a viable future?

Professor Alison Brysk from the University of California certainly thinks so.

"Two-thirds of the countries in the world now are in some sense democracies: there are some kinds of theoretical political rights for members of the polity to self-determine," she says.

"Hundreds of millions of people worldwide are participating in some form of human rights movement.

"We have the spread of a repertoire, vocabulary, civil society networks, intense networks."

Remaining 46 countries on UN Human Rights Council: Africa : Angola, Burundi, Democratic Republic of Congo, Egypt, Ethiopia, Ivory Coast, Kenya, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, South Africa, Togo, Tunisia

: Angola, Burundi, Democratic Republic of Congo, Egypt, Ethiopia, Ivory Coast, Kenya, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, South Africa, Togo, Tunisia Asia/Pacific : Australia, China, Japan, Kyrgyzstan, Mongolia, Nepal, Pakistan, Philippines, South Korea

: Australia, China, Japan, Kyrgyzstan, Mongolia, Nepal, Pakistan, Philippines, South Korea Europe : Belgium, Croatia, Georgia, Germany, Hungary, Slovak Republic, Slovenia, Spain, Switzerland, Ukraine, United Kingdom

: Belgium, Croatia, Georgia, Germany, Hungary, Slovak Republic, Slovenia, Spain, Switzerland, Ukraine, United Kingdom Latin America/Caribbean : Brazil, Chile, Cuba, Ecuador, Mexico, Panama, Peru, Venezuela

: Brazil, Chile, Cuba, Ecuador, Mexico, Panama, Peru, Venezuela Middle East: Afghanistan, Iraq, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates

But in the arena of values, there is now much competition.

Associate Professor Reinbold says the only way to truly understand the history of human rights is to view it as a form of narrative.

"Narrative creates particular kinds of realities and inspires people in particular kinds of ways," she says.

"One of the things that the narrative of the declaration is attempting to do is to supersede other alternative narratives that might be understood to be more destructive, more localist and more prone to generating human conflict.

"But some of those narratives, narratives of nationalism, for example, or of particular kinds of religious fundamentalism, they are extremely powerful narratives."

Associate Professor Keys agrees.

"Nativism, xenophobia, racism, angry exclusionary populism, a rise in authoritarianism, Trump and Brexit — those are developments that work against the basic premise of human rights, which is that there is a common humanity that unites us all and that is centrally important to defining our obligations to each other," she says.

The trend in global politics, she argues, has moved away from notions of "common humanity" in favour of narrow tribalism.

Seven decades on

The United Nations Human Rights Council sits in Geneva earlier this year. ( Getty: Jean-Guy Python )

December 10 will mark the 70th anniversary of the adoption of the UN Declaration of Human Rights.

Professor Moyn believes there is cause for celebration.

But optimism for the future, he says, should be guarded.

"It turns out that human rights are some values among others and they need to be pursued. They need to be pursued better than they have been, but as part of a much wider project," he says.

"For one thing, it seems as if majorities in many places don't like human rights.

"We have to figure out how to connect human rights to things that they care enough about, so that they tolerate human rights promotion."

And that, he says, necessitates much more attention to "distributional fairness" than the human rights movement has been able to advance so far.