Over the last 30 years human rights have triumphed. They unite left and right, north and south, church and state. The cosmopolitan world order promises the fulfilment of Enlightenment principles and an end to strife.

Yet human rights have only paradoxes to offer. Despite the statements about a universal right to life, every day brings more atrocious news from Darfur, Congo, Palestine and Mumbai. Despite pious statements about equality and dignity, at no other period has there been such huge economic gap between north and south or between the rich and the poor. According to an Oxfam report in October, over 1 billion people do not have enough food.

Human rights are an expression of the human urge to resist public and private domination and oppression. Their force unites Chinese dissidents, the defenders of refugees, immigrants and detainees of the war on terror as well as schoolkids in Greece. In the hands of western governments however they have become the latest version of the civilising mission.

In the west, the rise of neoliberal capitalism coincided with the cosmopolitan and humanitarian turn. The spread of human rights is not the result of the liberal or charitable disposition of the west exported to the south along with the second hand clothes offered to Oxfam. Global moral and civic rules are the necessary companion of neoliberal capitalism. Over the last 30 years, legal rules regulating investment, trade, aid and intellectual property have emerged. The World Bank, the IMF and the WTO impose "economic restructuring" conditions on developing states in loan and aid agreements. These constrain their ability to make decisions about wage levels, education, health and social security policies, they dictate the privatisation of public services and utilities and open trade while maintaining the protective policies for crucial western agricultural and manufacturing sectors.

Robert Cooper has called these arrangements the voluntary imperialism of the global economy. It is an imperialism "acceptable to a world of human rights and cosmopolitan values". Economic rules have been supplemented by various treaties and rhetorical statements on rights which prepare the future world citizen, highly moralised and regulated, but also highly materially differentiated despite the common rights everyone should enjoy from Helsinki to Hanoi.

The (implicit) promise to the developing world that adoption of the neoliberal model of good governance and limited rights will inexorably lead to western economic standards is fraudulent. Historically, the western ability to turn the protection of formal rights into a limited guarantee of material, economic and social rights was based on huge transfers of value from the colonies to the metropolis. The necessary reverse flows are not politically feasible. The successive crises and re-arrangements of neoliberal capitalism lead to dispossession and displacement of family farming by agribusiness, to forced migration and urbanisation. These processes expand the number of people without skills, status or the basics for existence. They become human debris, the waste-life, the bottom billion.

The new lingua franca of cosmopolitanism and humanitarianism presents the globe as a common symbolic space which promises prosperity, equal rights and perpetual peace. But as Immanuel Wallerstein put it, "if all humans have equal rights, and all the peoples have equal rights, then we cannot maintain the kind of inegalitarian system that the capitalist world-economy has always been and always will be." Neoliberal capitalism's "human waste" is presented as a natural disaster or inevitable life contingency and is abandoned to the magnanimity of philanthropists and the good will of pop stars.

When the chasm between the missionary statements on equality and dignity and the bleak reality of obscene inequality becomes apparent, the false promises of humanitarianism will lead to uncontrollable types of tension and conflict. Spanish soldiers met the advancing Napoleonic armies, shouting "Down with freedom!" It is not difficult to imagine people meeting the "peacekeepers" of the New Times with cries of "Down with human rights!"

Social and political systems become hegemonic by turning their ideological priorities into universal principles and values. In the new world order, human rights are the perfect candidate for this role. Their core principles, interpreted negatively and economically, promote neoliberal capitalist domination. This is not inevitable. If formulated differently, their abstract provisions could subject the inequalities and indignities of late capitalism to withering attack. But this cannot happen when the critique of injustice is formulated in the terms of that which begets and supports injustice. The usefulness of rights comes to an end when they lose their aim of resisting injustice.