The Pennsylvania State University

The Graduate School

College of the Liberal Arts

UTOPIAN RHETORICS: SPACE AND TIME IN THE UNITED NATIONS’ PURSUIT

OF COSMOPOLITAN PROGRESS

A Thesis in

Communication Arts and Sciences

by

Haley Schneider

Copyright 2017 Haley Schneider

Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of:

Master of Arts

December 2017

The thesis of Haley Schneider was reviewed and approved by the following:

Rosa A. Eberly Associate Professor of Communication Arts and Science and English and Director of the Intercollege Minor in Civic and Community Engagement Thesis Advisor

Stephen H. Browne Liberal Arts Research Professor of Communication Arts and Sciences and Advisor for the Rhetoric Minor

Bradford Vivian Associate Professor of Communication Arts and Sciences, Director of Undergraduate Studies and Advisor for the CAS Minor

Kirt H. Wilson Associate Professor of Communication Arts and Sciences Chair of the Graduate Program

*signatures are on file at the graduate school

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ABSTRACT

In this thesis I propose a utopian analysis of rhetorics of progress and development as to reconsider the connections between materiality and discourse. In recent years, rhetorical critics have extended their objects of analysis beyond the stasis of discursive texts to memorial sites, urban planning, tourism practices, consumer culture, and many other “texts” that push the boundaries of rhetorical theory. I argue that this expansion of texts merits new methods for analyzing persuasion that takes place over a longer period of time. Through a rhetorical analysis of three of the United Nations’ documents and programs, I utilize utopia as a rhetorical lens to examine how the United Nations sought to envision and enact change upon the material world. In chapter 1, I argue that the United Nations created a utopian time to invent and implement their vision for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In chapter 2, I examine the conflict between the World Heritage Committee and Dresden’s city officials over Dresden’s world heritage status. I find that the physical separation between the site in which the UN's utopian vision came to fruition and the site in which they attempt to enact it (Dresden Elbe Valley) rendered the materialization of utopia impossible. In chapter 3, I study UNESCO’s Memory of the World Archive, and contend that the temporal and spatial limitations of UNESCO's digital archive hinders the fulfillment of utopia. Throughout each chapter I consider how change is imagined, discussed, and enacted upon the material world. While the field of rhetoric has turned to material environments as sources for invention, scholars have insufficiently attended to the ways in which discursive ideas are made material through rhetorical actors. My thesis is a call to remedy this situation through a future-based analysis.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction………………………………………………………………………………………..1

Chapter 1: Drafting Utopia: Temporality and Discursive Space in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights…………………………………………………………………………………………….16

Chapter 2: Bridging Utopia: Memories of Rhetorical and Material Space in UNESCO’s World Heritage Program…………………………………………………………………………………………..50

Chapter 3: Realizing Utopia: Space and Time in UNESCO’s Memory of the World Program………………...... 88

Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………………...115

Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………………120

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Introduction

“We stand today at the threshold of a great event both in the life of the United Nations and in the life of mankind. This Universal Declaration of Human Rights may well become the international Magna Carta of all men everywhere. We hope its proclamation by the General Assembly will be an event comparable to the proclamation of the Declaration of the Rights of Man by the French people in 1789, the adoption of the Bill of Rights by the people of the United States, and the adoption of comparable declarations at different times in other countries.” -- Eleanor Roosevelt, On the Adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights1

When Eleanor Roosevelt endorsed the final draft of the Universal Declaration of Human

Rights, she professed the hope that the document would become instrumental in effecting change upon the world. She hoped that the declaration, like the Magna Carta, would reorient citizens and world leaders toward a new, peaceful future. Roosevelt’s dream for the Declaration evokes an essential rhetorical question: by what mechanisms does rhetoric persuade? How can a rhetorical act like the creation of the Declaration of Human Rights affect lasting change upon a person, society, or culture? In recent years, rhetorical critics have extended their subjects of analysis beyond the stasis of discursive texts to analyze memorial sites, urban planning, tourism practices, consumer culture, and many other “texts” that push the boundaries of rhetorical theory. Diverse as these rhetorical texts may be, they are all made salient to this field of study by the understanding that they somehow persuade. If effective, they attune audiences toward certain actions and trajectories.

In this thesis I consider how change is imagined, discussed, and enacted upon the material world. While the field of rhetoric has turned to material environments as sources for invention, scholars have insufficiently attended to the ways in which discursive ideas are made material through rhetorical actors. In other words, how does one reinvent a material environment to better align with their vision of how the world should be? In rhetorical studies, change is

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understood according to the concepts of persuasion and kairos.2 Change is the result of a rhetorical agent’s attempts to direct her audience toward a particular action, but the movement toward materialism has made greater attention to the mechanisms of persuasion, which extend far beyond the moment of encounter between rhetor and audience. In this thesis, I propose a study of persuasion that unfolds over a longer period of time. This study is not one of effects but of the rhetorical mechanisms for materializing a vision for the future.

Persuasion and Change in Time and Space

Change is measured across the dual trajectory of space and time.3 The concept of time, which orders events and arranges history on a linear axis, is traditionally tied to notions of becoming in the discursive and material world. According to John E. Smith, “Process, the ubiquity of becoming, stretches over the entire physical and organic world.”4 Conceptions of time, then, explain observed change. Time itself renders change possible, whether the process takes seconds or spans centuries. Applied to worldly phenomena, time offers an explanation for processes of becoming.

Applied to human history, time becomes not only a measure of process but of progress.

While process is a non-valuative observation of change, progress is a linear evaluation of betterment. Applied to human history, progress denotes an optimism that political societies, or humanity more generally, can move forward toward an objectively better state of being. Progress is measured along a linear temporal axis, in which ideas of past, present, and future string together disparate events into a narrative of development. Political philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote that the past and future are perceived as forces that act upon humans, rather than concepts utilized for orienting human action.5 Much of rhetorical criticism mirrors this bias toward past

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and present as forces: the past arranges desires through tradition and nostalgia, while the pull of the future can inspire sacrifice or revolutionary fervor.6 The present, Arendt contends, is viewed as a gap in which one aligns oneself with these temporal pulls. She explains, “Only because man is inserted into time and only to the extent that he stands his ground does the flow of different time break up into tenses.”7 The present, then, is regarded as a gap in time, in which possibilities for declaring fealty to a particular narrative of the past or future abound.

The potentiality of the present is explored rhetorically through the concept of kairos. kairos, Smith argues, is a qualitative measure of time.8 The term kairos, “right timing,” places events within a historical narrative context. Not all events make it into kairic time: only those that imbue meaning or fit into a particular theme or narrative will be taken account for. Hans

Kellner asserts that all histories are written in this kairic or “untimely” fashion. First, Kellner argues that places and cultures only make it into history through their connections to “progress,” that humans look backward in time to connect previously unconnected events into a thematic narrative arc. The events that are lost in time, which Kellner terms “chronoschims,” are forgotten because they disrupt the narrative of progress.9 Second, he argues that histories are chosen backwards – cultural identities are constructed in the present using tools from the past.10 Time, then, is a rhetorical tool for identity-building and persuasion. kairos is time manipulated to serve a greater human purpose.

Due to the entanglement of space and time, kairos must have a spatial as well as temporal component. Materialist Thomas Rickert argues that spatializing kairos points to its embeddedness in the material world.11 Opportunity, Rickert claims, derives not only from right time but from a surrounding environment that enables some potentialities or trajectories while concealing opportunities for others. Rickert’s call to spatialize kairos echoes the move toward a

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more dynamic theory of space. According to geographer Doreen Massey, modern and postmodern theorists have traditionally subordinated space to time, where time is a dynamic, changing force upon the world, and space is the static container that time acts upon.12 This hierarchizing of space over time is wrong, Massey argues, because space itself is constantly shifting and changing. She defines space instead as a dynamic process constituted by social interactions.13 Space becomes process through the shifting nature of interactions by humans, cultures, and systems. Embedded in this definition of space, kairos is dependent upon not only right time but right space: an environment that renders certain forms of persuasion more compelling than others.

Persuasion, then, requires mastery of both time and space – the ability to not only recognize opportune times and places but to invoke them through discourse and political processes. In rhetorical theory, space and time persuade by conceptualizing identity. Rhetorical scholars bring together notions of time and space in memory studies, which seeks to understand how collective memories are created, embodied, and practiced. The two processual terms work in concert to form place, which Carole Blair, Greg Dickinson, and Brian Ott define as a bordered, recognizable segment of space – it is space made rhetorical.14 Massey similarly describes place as “practiced space.”15 According to Massey place is a trajectory within space that orients one toward particular thoughts and actions. For example, a war memorial is a place constituted for a specific type of remembrance pertaining to war. Whether the site glorifies a just war, mourns lost soldiers, or laments acts of violence, its visitors are invited to embrace a particular trajectory of remembrance. By creating a trajectory toward a certain type of remembrance, the site’s creators seek to build collective memory, and as a result, a collective identity built on shared memories and practices.

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While places are constituted through shared identity, identity is in turn constituted through one’s lived experience of place and time. One’s experience of place and time is always mediated, as the built environment, including social structures such as capitalism and commerce, both creates and limits possibilities for existence. Social anthropologist Antonio A. Arantes identified this experience in terms of symbolic boundaries, writing that identities vary greatly within a seemingly unified culture due to the existence of structural boundaries like architecture, economic class, and value systems developed through one’s interaction with their environment.16

Similarly, communication scholar Sarah Sharma argued that individuals living and working in a space are separate because they occupy different temporalities, which Sharma defines as the lived experience of time.17 According to Arantes and Sharma, the potentialities for constructing identity are confined to the structural and social systems at one’s disposal. Therefore, reconstituting identity or changing one’s perspective involves restructuring the world they inhabit.

One approach to restructuring identity, particularly identity seeped in nationality, is the adaptation of cosmopolitan philosophy. Cosmopolitanism, a response to growing awareness of the forces of globalization, is a worldly attunement, an increased awareness of a connection to people and cultures farther removed from one’s own. Globalization, according to Raka Shome and Radha Hegde, “produces a state of culture in transnational motion.”18 The study of globalization is an acknowledgment of the interconnected nature of place, nation, and culture, the recognition that material and discursive effects extend past the locality of one’s community, city, or state. Numerous scholars have drafted a vocabulary for studying this idea of separate-yet- connected space. Anthropologist Setha Low explained global space as deterritorialized space, an area that has been stripped of its local boundaries through its connection to a larger network.19

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Globalization thus requires a shift in perspective from the local to the translocal. While much scholarship has attended to the dynamics of globalization, translocality, and cosmopolitanism, the mechanisms for redirection toward a global perspective have received less attention.

Studies of transnationalism and collective memory reveal that spatial persuasion involves not only recognizing available means but actively creating them. Although it is a rhetorically rich concept, kairos is an insufficient concept to describe acts that seem to transcend standard spatial- temporal narratives. Bradford Vivian argues that some rhetorical acts seem to defy kairic sensibilities, such as the untimely act of witnessing.20 Witnesses, Vivian writes, does not wait for an exigence to begin their practice; rather, the present is presented as an eternal exigence. Similar to Arendt’s observation that the present appears open to new potentialities for being, the present for Vivian’s witnessing offers countless opportunities for its practice. The importance of finding the most opportune space and time fades and continued practice takes precedence. Longevity subsumes kairos as the predictor of a rhetoric that endures.

Vivian claims that nongovernmental organizations like the United Nations adopt untimely acts in order to prepare for a better future. He writes that events like the drafting of the

Universal Declaration of Human Rights “symbolize the broad Enlightenment project of establishing conditions for perpetual historical progress intended to be the cultural and political inheritance of Western modernity.”21 Vivian still identifies a Kairic moment in the United

Nations’ practices, writing that the future “will begin to materialize when an hour arrives in which scores of unwitnessed past injustices can be witnessed – if such an hour ever arrives.”22

This argument still prioritizes an expectation of a perfect moment that a rhetorical agent can grasp – even if that moment is deferred to the future. The kairic notion of opportune moment is insufficient, because the United Nations does not only prepare for a peaceful, cosmopolitan

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future but actively calls it into existence. Through declarations, treaties, the uptake of local memorials into world heritage sites, and even the material presence of the United Nations

Headquarters in New York and the UNESCO headquarters in Paris, the United Nations works to construct its particular vision for the future within the materiality of the present, to meet the future halfway. This work seeks to better attune rhetorical scholarship to the mechanisms that materialize elements of a desirable future.

These mechanisms are crucial to rhetorical studies because they illuminate the purpose of rhetoric, which according to Rickert, is the persuasion that results from various interacting material and environmental forces.23 Persuasion is an act of direction (or redirection) toward a trajectory; as such, it always occurs in the future. The field of rhetoric, then, must pay greater attention to the processes by which rhetoric does its work. Persuasion works not through a singular speech or action but through an ongoing structuring of one’s environment. To persuade, a rhetor must first adopt an orientation that continually directs their speech and actions toward their intended goal; for example, leaders of the United Nations must align all of their outreach programs to their values of cosmopolitanism, democratic education, and lasting peace. The

United Nations persuades not through discourse alone but through a long-term active restructuring of its surrounding environment. It is this give and take between actor and environment that prompted Rickert to describe the rhetorical concept of invention as “an emergent process extending the boundaries rhetorical theory customarily draws by emphasizing an autonomous, self-willing, and clearly individualized subject.”24 Rickert advocates for a more dynamic, materialist description of the role of invention in rhetoric, but further inquiry into the methods by which individuals, institutions, and organizations utilize the processes of invention is merited.

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Utopia as a Rhetorical Mechanism

The concept of utopia in political philosophy elucidates the processes of invention and redirection. Utopia, a term that arises from Thomas More’s literary criticism of 18th century

British feudal society, blurs the lines between the ancient Greek “good place (eutopia) and “no place” outopia” to refer to an imaginary perfect society.25 Even as a work of fiction, utopia functioned as political critique. Since More’s famous novel, the term utopia was taken up in

Marxist political philosophy, where its capacity to promote structural change has been debated.

Philosopher Roger Paden defined utopia as “a political project involving the description of an ideal society to be used both as a goal to guide social reform and as a normative standard to critically evaluate existing societies.”26 Although utopianism is commonly linked to socialist philosophy, its relation to the cause has been defined by a dual embrace and rejection of its claim to structural change through idealized visions. “Utopian socialists” like Charles Fourier, Henri de

Saint-Simon, and Robert Owen were thus coined by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, who accused their socialist predecessors of promoting a vision with no real mechanism for enforcement.27 Marx and Engels claimed to replace utopian socialism with what they termed

“scientific utopianism,” an approach that emphasizes mechanisms above all else. Yet, utopian elements persevere in Marx and Engel’s works. According to Paden, the philosophers proposed a

“dynamic utopia,” a discursive vision of utopia that maintains an ideal standard but demands active work toward its realization.28 Thus, Marx and Engels’ political strategy maintained a utopian bent even as they critiqued earlier utopian socialists. While utopian visions differ across centuries, political systems, and theoretical backgrounds, each questions what a better future would look like and how a society may logically arrive at such a future.

Despite its theoretically rich history, utopia has previously received little attention from

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rhetorical scholars, appearing more as an afterthought than as a driving conceptual force.29 If attended to, utopia could provide a vocabulary for studying the connections between kairos, discourse, and materiality. Philosopher Paul Ricoeur called utopia a discursive process, a give and take between an idealized vision and the evolving processes of its implementation. Ricoeur also emphasized the non-kairic nature of Utopia: “Change does not occur at any moment but as the culmination of historical evolution. Instead of a focus on the outburst of the kairos, the emphasis is on growth and becoming.”30 Ricouer and his socialist predecessor, Karl Mannheim, analyzed the difference between ideology and utopia, both of which, they claim, play an integral role in political and social development. According to Ricoeur and Mannheim, ideology is also an ideal, but it is an ideal that aligns with and justifies a dominant political system. Ideology simultaneously reacts to and acts upon one’s environment: it provides an explanation for the systems and effects in place, which in turn attunes its constituents toward actions that reinforce that ideology. Ideology, like rhetoric, is inseparable from the material world in which it operates.

Utopia, too, is inseparable from the environment in which it originates. Unlike ideology, utopia functions not to support existing political systems but to critique them. Utopia is a reorientation, a source of rhetorical invention that illuminates an alternative way of being. As a source of invention, utopia remains tethered to the concept of kairos. Invention, according to

Rickert, is an answer to the call of kairos, an act of adaptation to the situation at hand.31 Yet utopia takes invention a step further to not only respond to the kairic force of a moment, but to create the conditions where such acts of invention can occur. Utopias are created through critique and contrast; their inventive power is derived from imagining better alternatives. Thus, utopias’ existence depends on the very structures they seek to replace. Far from being a static creation, utopian visions change and adapt along with the environments they critique.

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Like ideology, utopia in the material world is unattainable. Rather, ideology and utopia are tethered to each other and to the environment that they both offer explanation for. The differences between ideology and utopia illustrate questions of materiality and consequence in the international political sphere. To better understand the entanglement of material environments and utopian processes, I analyze the United Nation’s (UN) efforts to act as a force of change upon international politics. Intended to be the organization that brings about world peace, since its formation the UN has promoted programs and practices designed to persuade an international audience to reject a lens of national interest in favor of a global, democratic humanity. Throughout its history, the UN has endeavored to reinvent sovereign spaces, histories, and identities, but these intentions are often overshadowed by pervasive national interests in both its constituents and its internal organizations. To better understand the UN’s rhetorical relevance,

I first provide a brief history of the organization.

The United Nations: Post-War Response and Cosmopolitan Reinvention

The United Nations (UN) was formed in 1945 as a reaction to the horrors of World War

II. The UN, which initially consisted of representatives from the United States, Soviet Union,

United Kingdom, and China, was to act as the “world’s policeman,” protecting individuals and nations from aggressive governments. The new leaders of the UN, originally the allied powers in

World War II, believed that the organization would play a key role in establishing a new world order.32 Their first step toward this new world order was securing peace through the United

Nations Charter in 1945. Through this charter, representatives of the UN sought to create a united peace, rather than pursuing separate agreements between the involved nations. The charter also established the first international court of justice, transferring judgements of right and wrong

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to an international decision-making body.33

The UN was a materialization of world leaders’ desires for an international body of governance. While an international system had been attempted before after World War I, the end of the second world war prompted renewed interest in peace through international compliance.34

The UN’s literature emphasized the Holocaust as the primary motivation for the organization’s founding, but it was likely a response to its founders’ power and war atrocities as well.35 The end of World War II also marked the beginning of the Cold War, which, historian John Lewis Gaddis argues, attuned U.S. representatives and their allies to the mounting ideological difference and improved war technologies, including nuclear power, that could be used to enforce them.36 In the midst of a potential future marked by increasing ideological tensions and sovereign aggressions, the UN would provide an alternative vision of international relations, one that heralded peace above all else.

The UN’s counter-narrative to current international relations was foregrounded in a democratic version of peace – one that favored individualist, democratic capitalism over collectivist, socialist values. Historian Stanley Meisler argued that U.S. representatives, in particular, used the status of the UN in every way possible to fight the spread of communism.37

Because representatives in the United States and capitalist nations dominated the UN’s leadership, the organization’s mission became synonymous with that the pursuits of democratic capitalism. Accordingly, the UN states that its mission is to maintain international peace and security, protect human rights, deliver humanitarian aid, promote sustainable development, and uphold international law.38 One of the ways the organization claims to achieve these goals is through democratic education. The United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural

Organization (UNESCO) was founded in 1945 to promote international understanding and

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appreciation for cosmopolitanism, democracy, and intercultural education across national borders. A subdivision of the UN, UNESCO is the organization’s ideology in action; the programs it backs seek to translate a cosmopolitan ideal into the everyday practices of globally- minded citizens.

This thesis examines the implications of the UN’s attempts to impose a universal ideal upon an international audience. Through an analysis of the UN’s appeals to shared international space, democratic values, and the significance of the future, I aim to understand the UN’s mechanisms of persuasion. I argue that representatives of the UN seek to persuade through reinvention of the world around them: in the laws they impose and the programs that they implement, the UN’s leaders aspire to influence the world around them to reflect their vision of what could be. Because the UN’s vision is rooted in an ideal hope for what could be in the future, I implement utopia as a rhetorical lens to analyze the organization’s rhetoric of progress and development.

Through my study of the UN I aim to better understand the mechanisms of persuasion as an ongoing act of resituating the environment in which a rhetorical agent operates. To do so, I study three of the UN’s efforts to enact its cosmopolitan principles within a world political order dominated by national sovereignty. In Chapter 1, Drafting Utopia, I analyze the drafting process of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Revisiting the two years of the documents creation through the UN’s meeting minutes and representatives’ reflections, I consider what sources of invention existed for imaging utopia within the organization’s respective place and time. My analysis is informed through rhetorical scholarship on temporality and kairos, which enables scholars to understand the discursive tools for invention.

In Chapter 2, Bridging Utopia, I study the UN’s efforts to translate their discursive ideals

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onto physical space. To do so, I take up the German city of Dresden as a case study of

UNESCO’s World Heritage Program, which takes up local spaces into an international memory framework. This chapter responds to scholarship in cosmopolitanism and international memory by investigating how physical sites are identified, bordered, and imbued with meaning. Through a discourse analysis of the correspondence between the World Heritage Committee and

Dresden’s representatives, I study each group’s conflicting priorities – to an international audience and to the city’s residents, respectively – resulted in the site’s delisting from the World

Heritage List in 2009. I argue that because UNESCO’s regulation of space was designed to meet a utopian standard designed outside of Dresden’s borders, the project conflicted with the needs and desires of the sites local inhabitants.

In Chapter 3, Realizing Utopia, I examine UNESCO’s Memory of the World Program as an attempt to transcend space and time, transforming utopian vision into dominant ideology. In this chapter I consider how the materiality of rhetoric both supports and contradicts ideological conceptions of time and space. Memory of the World is a digital archival program that seeks to preserve historical documents from around the world in a single digital register. Through an analysis of the program’s attempts to transcend the temporal and spatial limitations that plagues physical documents, I contemplate the purpose of utopia in persuasion, asking by what processes the utopian vision is fulfilled.

The UN is a large organization, and in selecting these three case studies I intend to track the UN’s practices for inducing change over the years since its founding. Although only a small sampling of the multitude of programs and practices performed under UN leadership, these studies call into question the mechanisms of change, as well as the role that our conceptions of space and time play in the materialization of cosmopolitan ideologies. As a large governing body

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with a good deal of discursive, if not legal, influence, the UN challenges conceptions of rhetoric and persuasion in its attempts to align cosmopolitan citizens to its way of being. In the creation and maintenance of a utopia that can never truly come into existence, the UN’s cosmopolitan worldview seeks to endure into the future.

Notes 1 Eleanor Roosevelt, On the Adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Paris, France: December 9, 1948. http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/eleanorrooseveltdeclarationhumanrights.htm. 2 James L. Kinneavy. “Kairos: A Neglected Concept in Classical Rhetoric” Rhetoric and Praxis (1986), 80. 3 Doreen Massey. For Space. ( SAGE Publications Ltd., 2005), 61. 4 John E. Smith. “Time and Qualitative Time” in Phillip Sipiora and James S. Baumlin Rhetoric and Kairos: Essays in History, Theory, and Praxis. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), 50. 5 Hannah Arendt. Between Past and Future. (New York: The Penguin Group, 1954), 10. 6 Robert Asen. “Reflections on the Role of Rhetoric in Public Policy” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 13.1 (2010) 121-143.; Bradford Vivian. “Witnessing Time: Rhetorical Form, Popular Culture, and Popular Historical Education” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 44.3 (2014) 204-219.; Stephen H. Browne. “The Pastoral Voice in John Dickinson’s First ‘Letter From a Farmer in Pennsylvania’” Quarterly Journal of Speech 9 (1990) 46-57. 7 Arendt 10. 8 Smith 47. 9 Hans Kellner. “Is History Ever Timely?” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 44.3 (2014), 237. 10 Kellner 235. 11 Thomas Rickert. Ambient Rhetoric: The Attunements of Rhetorical Being. (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013), 76. 12 Massey 29. 13 Massey 20. 14 Greg Dickinson, Carole Blair, and Brian L. Ott. Places of Public Memory: The Rhetoric of Museums and Memorials. (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2010), 6. 15 Massey 154. 16 Antonio A. Arantes. “The War of Places: Symbolic Boundaries and the Liminalities in Urban Space” Theory, Culture & Society 13.4 (1996), 84. 17 Sarah Sharma. In the Meantime: Temporality and Cultural Politics. (Duke University Press, 2014) 8. 18 Raka Shome and Radha Hegde. “Culture, Communication, and the Challenge of Globalization” Critical Studies in Media Communication 19.2 (2002), 174. 19 Setha Low. Spatializing Culture: The Ethnography of Space and Place. (London and New York: Routledge, 2016) 176. 20 Bradford Vivian. “Witnessing Time: Rhetorical Form, Public Culture, and Popular Historical Education.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 44.3 (2014),208.

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21 Vivian 211. 22 Ibid. 23 Rickert 34. 24 Rickert 77. 25 Thomas More. Utopia. CreateSpace Independent Publishing. 26 Roger Paden. “Marx’s Critique of the Utopian Socialists” Utopian Studies 13.2 (2002), 70. 27 Frederick Engels. Socialism: Utopian and Scientific. (International Publishers Co., Inc., 1935) 33. 28 Paden 90. 29 Matthew Houdek. “The Rhetorical Force of ‘Global Archival Memory’: (Re)SituatingArchives Along the Global Memoryscape.” Journal of International and Intercultural Communication 9, no. 3 (2016), 204-221. 30 Paul Ricoeur. Lectures on Ideology and Utopia. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 278. 31 Rickert 95. 32 Stanley Meisler. United Nations: A History. (New York: Grove Press, 2011), 2. 33 The United Nations. The Charter of the United Nations. http://www.un.org/en/sections/un- charter/introductory-note/index.html. 34 The League of Nations, established during the first world war, was largely viewed as a failure. Meisler 4. 35 The United States, for example, dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a use of military technology with dire consequences. In grappling with this new military power, world leaders had to construct a narrative of peace for the future. Ran Zwigenberg. Hiroshima: The Origins of Global Memory Culture, (Cambridge University Press, 2014), 28. 36 John Lewis Gaddis. The Cold War. (New York: The Penguin Press, 2005), 10. 37 Stanley Meisler. United Nations: A History. (New York: Grove Press, 1995), 58. 38 The United Nations. “What We Do” http://www.un.org/en/about-un/.

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Chapter 1

Drafting Utopia: Temporality and Discursive Space in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

On December 10, 1948, the United Nations General Assembly approved the final draft of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The document, designed to set an international standard for the rights of all people, was approved amid a flurry of activity by members of the

United Nations (UN).1 While many resolutions passed by the UN at this time dealt with pressing contemporary concerns – budgeting, filling committees, establishing provisions – the Declaration of Human Rights was developed with a particular vision of the future in mind. Justification for the Declaration of Human Rights hinged upon a forthcoming time marked by international cooperation and intervention. By outlining international standards, participating countries would be able to identify human rights abuses and intervene in future situations. The members of its drafting committee suggested that adhering to this practice could prevent another World War from occurring.2

At the UN’s inception, many of its rules and regulations could not be fully recognized under current postwar conditions. It was therefore imperative that the UN create a space where its ideological practices made sense. This was a complex problem for two reasons. First, the UN would have to invoke a future that matched its aspirations. Second, its practices necessitated a cosmopolitan space – sovereign borders would be transcended in this idealized future. The UN’s answer to this problem was the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: a collection of 30 articles on fundamental rights meant to apply to all human beings. Rooted in democratic principles, the declaration covered human rights pertaining to physical and spiritual needs, self-

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expression, nationality, and political freedom. It was expected that member states of the UN follow them, although there was no formal method of implementation.

The UN’s human rights document was fully implemented not in the present, but in a discursive future marked by cosmopolitan citizenship and the absence of war. The time and space in which human rights discourse was a working reality, then, was not material but rhetorical. In this essay, I conceptualize time and development as rhetorical constructs, discernable only through discourse. I divide my analysis into three sections: past, present, and future. Because all three depictions of time are inherently tied to the creation of utopia, I consider how each one helped arrange and clarify the UN’s values. Although the document’s writers attempted to align the declaration within a linear narrative of human development, the work came to embody a utopic sense of time in which past, present, and future were intertwined.

Due to the many ways that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights defies a static sense of temporality, it would be unwise to solely examine the final draft of the document.

Instead, I study the ongoing process of the document’s creation – how it was called into being and justified by members of the UN. In my first section, I consider how the UN’s rhetoric was designed to place the struggles of World War II – the human rights abuses, territorial disputes, and weapons of mass destruction – definitively in the past, to be learned from but not returned to.

In my next analysis, I consider how members of the UN grappled with specific, present concerns that arose during the time period. In particular, I consider the tension between ongoing contemporary human rights abuses and the UN’s sense of universalism. Finally, I follow the

UN’s redirection from presentism to utopianism as members of the Human Rights Commission shifted their focus to prepping for a better future. The process of the document’s creation, then, marked a constant temporal turn, as the past, present, and future each took precedence at

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different areas of the discourse. The text’s utopian element was in its eventual prioritization of the future. As the mechanisms of the present became more complicated, the UN’s vision for the future became clearer.

Rhetorics of Utopia

The future exerts a powerful force upon political decision-making. Whether utopian or dystopian, pragmatic or idealistic, expectations for the future are invoked to justify actions in the present. Rhetorical scholars have not sufficiently studied the rhetorical nature of the future in policy deliberations. Although the future is commonly perceived as something that does not yet exist, its rhetorical function is as strong, if not stronger than, the past or present. Temporality has shaped a good deal of rhetorical criticism, but scholars have focused mainly on how the past is discussed in the present. Such studies do not analyze the future, though they do highlight the entanglement of space and time.3

Understanding world heritage requires an orientation toward temporality, which communication scholar Sarah Sharma defines as the lived experience of time. A sense of temporality is constructed by systems of power, and multiple temporalities can occupy a single space and time.4 Rhetorical scholar Robert Asen highlights the polysemous function of temporality on policy decisions. According to Asen, a public policy debate is an ongoing process that encompasses multiple temporalities, as some policy elements progress faster than others.5

He describes public policy as a mediation between material and rhetorical forces, as rhetors in policy debates invoke a constructed citizenship that is both there and not there, that is present rhetorically but may not exist materially.6

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I identify two points of departure from Asen in my own work. First, I extend Asen’s processual analysis to a seemingly static text – the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Drafted in the years following World War II, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was a response to growing international interest in protecting individuals from their own governments.7

While the original UN Charter mentioned human rights, the UN did not decide to write an official human rights bill until May 4, 1945, when UN secretary Edward Stettinius established the Commission on Human Rights, a group led by nine representatives from Australia, Canada,

Chile, China, France, Lebanon, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States, who were to draft and eventually publish the declaration.8 Overseen by Canadian lawyer John P.

Humphrey, the commission was led by Chairman Eleanor Roosevelt (United States), Vice-

Chairman Peng-Chun Cheng (China), and Rapporteur Charles Habib Malik. While Humphrey wrote the initial draft that served as the base for the final document, human rights historian

Johannes Morsink explained that the drafting process was the combined effort of the entire commission.9 However, this inclusivity did not presuppose diversity, and the declaration was largely a western project. The majority of the accepted rights came from the American Law

Institute, and the selected Eastern representatives Cheng and Malik were educated in the United

States.10 Thus, the “universal” document was grounded in Western political ideology.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights underwent an extensive revision process.

From 1946 – 1948, the contents Humphrey’s initial document were expanded, deleted, debated and edited by members of the Commission on Human Rights before the final document was brought to the General Assembly for a vote. The document’s passage was important to members of the United Nations because they believed that it would unite sovereign governments under international law and imbue the organization with more influence than the League of Nations had

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after World War I.11 The declaration, then, was not only a matter of what rights each human being should be said to possess; it was about what central concepts belonged in international law, and what role the UN – a largely western organization – should have in international politics.

The process of the document’s creation, then, is just as rhetorically salient as its final manifestation. Thus, in addition to examining the finished document, I analyze the mechanism of its creation – the meeting minutes and correspondence of the United Nations Commission of

Human Rights. Transcribed and archived by the United Nations, these documents contribute to a more complete intellectual history of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

In addition to extending Asen’s work to a processual text, I constitute temporality on a larger continuum – the trajectory of human development across history – to examine the rhetorical turn from past and present to future that encompasses policy decisions deemed incompatible with present-day ideologies and political systems. Rhetorical scholars have examined the concurrence of past, present, and future in rhetorical acts. Bradford Vivian argues that the act of moral witnessing rearranges humans’ sense of chronology so that past and present may speak to one another. Witnessing is timeless, he proposes, because it brings wrongs from the past forward in time to be redressed, or at least understood, in the present. Vivian claims,

“[Witnessing] refers to several times at once (past, present, future) and to no time in particular— to an ideal time, a time which has not yet arrived, in which the imperative to witness is satisfied at last.”12 While Vivian highlights the role of an ideal time in discursive acts, he does not speak to the process of the ideal’s creation. Because this future does not and will likely never exist, it must come into being through a rhetorical process that distorts past, present, and future. I argue that this process merits more attention. Through a rhetorical study of the creation of an idealized future, critics can better understand how political agents justify change through temporal shifts. I

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suggest utopia as a system of rhetorical analysis that demonstrates the gradual prioritization of an idealized future.

To understand how a particular future is called into being to justify policy decisions, I study the rhetorical practices of the United Nations. I consider the UN’s discourse as it relates to utopia. The term “utopia” derives from two Greek words: eutopia, “good place” and outopia, “no place.”13 Sixteenth century author Thomas More popularized the term in his novel Utopia, which deliberately obscured the distinction between good place and no place. Since then, utopia has come to stand for any idealized fictional place. The word utopia began as a joke, a deliberate confusion between good place and no place.14 In More’s book, though, the joke served a larger purpose. More’s utopia was a critique of the socially stratified British society in which he lived.

His method of critique was one of contrast: by comparing his imaginary perfect society to that of

16th century England, he revealed the latter’s unjust feudal practices. Since its literary beginning, then, utopia has always been a reflection of the present. Political wrongs, often so pervasive in society that they go unnoticed, become recognized when new alternatives become imaginable.

Utopia is a rhetorical devise for critique and invention in the present. Due to utopia’s penchant for critique and ability to introduce new societal norms, the concept has become influential in political philosophy. In Marxist theory in particular, the concept of utopia is scrutinized as a mechanism to produce change. 15 The majority of Marxist philosophers view utopia negatively. Georges Sorel, for example, used the term “utopian” to refer to a political ideal that failed to attend to actual mechanisms for change.16 Sorel believed that a better society was achievable, but only after a revolution was planned and carried out by the working class.

Utopia, to Sorel and other traditional Marxists, was a distraction from the distinct concerns of the present.

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Less traditional Marxist descriptions of utopia are exactly the opposite. Rather than distracting those who wish to invoke change, visions of utopia are created in the minds of political agents to motivate action. According to this outlook, utopia functions as a bridge to a currently unattainable future. In his lectures on utopia, Paul Ricoeur wrote, “The field of the possible is now open beyond that of the actual; it is a field, therefore, for alternative ways of living.”17 Utopias serve as a beginning because they call humans to envision ways of being that exist outside of contemporary ideologies. For this reason, Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch argued that utopia was absolutely essential to human development.18 Without utopia, he argued, there would be nowhere to start rebuilding society.

Whether revered or contested, utopia’s presence in Marxist thought is fitting. Socialism envisions a just society in which labor and work are distributed evenly and must subsequently determine the mechanisms for achieving such a dream. Democratic capitalists, on the other hand, assume no such equal distribution of work. The foundations of democratic capitalism did not arise from utopian theorists, thus, this political ideology is not often analyzed in regards to utopa.

Just like socialism, though, perfect democracies are also an ideal-not-yet-realized. Although it is more traditionally associated with Marxist thought, utopia is also a useful way to analyze how notions of democracy are idealized and spread across continents. Democratic capitalism, too, has a utopian hold on those who pursue it.

Because they represent an ideal not-yet-realized, utopias seem to exist solely in the future. The future alone is an inadequate measure of utopia, because the concept of utopia disrupts our sense of linear time. Marxist philosopher and utopian theorist Karl Mannheim wrote,

“It is not only the past but the future as well which has virtual existence in the present. A weighing of each of the factors existing in the present, and an insight into the tendencies latent in

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these forces, can be obtained only if the present is understood in light of its concrete fulfillment in the future.”19 Instead of chronological order, utopian time is organized in a way that best promotes its ideals. Utopic time closes the distance between history, the present, and the projected “perfect” time by gathering each temporal possibility in a single, imagined space. The past, present, and future work in concert to form utopia.

The United Nations: A Post-World War II, Pre-Cold War Organization

To understand why the UN selected a particular vision for its future, it is important to understand the demands of the present in which it was drafted. The discourse the UN put forth about the Declaration of Human Rights depicted the organization rising from the ashes of World

War II to usher in a new era of peace and international cooperation. Its official website says,

“With the end of that war, and the creation of the United Nations, the international community vowed never again to allow atrocities like those of that conflict happen again.”20 The 50 member nations, brought together by a desire for peace, stated their commitment to the democratic principles that would prevent another major war. In reality, the UN’s history of pursuing a global democratic sensibility was more nuanced. Disputes over territorial claims, political ideology, and the value of global democracy were central issues at the end of the war. These implicit disagreements constitute the exigence for the Declaration of Human Rights.

One such disagreement centered on the legitimacy of democratic capitalism. In 1948, the value of democratic leadership was still up for debate. The Soviet Union’s influence had grown massively in the aftermath of World War II, and establishing a global democratic sensibility was not the common sense decision the UN made it out to be. According to Cold War historian John

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Lewis Gaddis, World War II provided many reasons to advocate for communism. The Soviet

Union had a strong economy and had played an important role in defeating Germany, taking the brunt of the losses. Furthermore, communists in Europe had led the resistance against German occupation in Europe, which gave the ideology a sense of morality to Europeans. Gaddis points out that World War II was a war between democratic nations – to some, the destruction was evidence of a failed ideology. Gaddis claimed, “It was at least as easy to believe, in 1945, that authoritarian communism was the wave of the future as that democratic capitalism was.”21 The newly formed United Nations, then, operated within a time period dominated by the two contrasting ideologies.

Much as the preceding times had been shaped by World War II, the years following the defeat of the Axis powers were shaped by the beginning of the Cold War. While the UN was drafting the Declaration of Human Rights, territorial disputes between the United States and the

Soviet Union plagued Eastern Europe. The Soviet Union had sacrificed a lot to defeat Germany, and Joseph Stalin hoped to expand his empire in return.22 The United States, on the other hand, hoped to staunch the flow of communism into other European nations by rebuilding the legitimacy of democratic capitalism. In the late forties and early fifties the Soviet Union worked to extend the borders around its territory, while the United States worked to transcend those same borders. In the eyes of the UN, though, these borders were already dissolved – the Declaration of

Human Rights described everyone as equal citizens of the world.

Gaddis writes that Europeans in war-torn countries needed two things in the late 1940s: material aid and hope.23 Offering hope in the form of democratic capitalism would be challenging, as the ideology had failed to prevent two major world wars. The United States had shown little interest in global democratic capitalism; however, the bombing of Pearl Harbor and

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the ensuing struggle resulted in a desire to protect U.S. interest abroad. 24 The United States needed to reframe democratic capitalism as the best political ideology for the future.

To protect U.S. interests, world leaders had to present democratic capitalism as the wave of the future, but they needed a way to bridge the gap from tumultuous present to perfect future.

For the UN, at least, the very creation of a utopic space was meant to bridge that gap. The men and women involved in the UN had witnessed a major war and large-scale human rights violations and continued to witness territorial conflicts after the war. Ricoeur wrote that despite utopia’s orientation to the future, different utopias exist within certain times and political climates. Due to Nazi Germany’s treatment of the Jewish population, the UN’s utopic vision would emphasize the shared humanity of people around the world. Furthermore, a global reality defined by territorial disputes produced a utopia without geographical borders. Although it did not materially exist, this utopic space was necessary to outline the UN’s ideology and orientation to the world. This utopic vision was also necessary if the organization was to operate with influence on the world. The transcendence of borders and commitment to see humans as inherently similar was at odds with the inclination of world leaders to divide and control territories. To enact its programs, the UN needed to put forth a vision that illustrated the cosmopolitan peace they sought for the future.

The UN was designed to operate outside of sovereign interests. In reality, the organization was not untouched by the motivations of world leaders. Since its formation the UN was a stage in which the conflicts between its representative nations played out. The struggle to maintain democratic capitalism did not remain outside of the world organization but came to shape the UN’s ideology. Records from the years spent drafting the Declaration of Human

Rights reveal the many disagreements between communist and capitalist representatives.

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Ultimately, the clout of international leaders from the United States, Canada, Britain, and elsewhere swayed the commission’s commitment away from communist ideology. The UN’s utopia was defined not only by peace, but a peace marked by global democratic capitalism.

An Era of Rebuilding: Utopia in the Past

Paul Ricoeur wrote that times of restoration, like the end of a revolution or war, tend to be driving forces of utopian thought.25 In the aftermath of such devastation, dominant ideologies are shaken and the future appears to be in flux. World War II provided such a force for the UN.

In this section I analyze how the war was utilized as a rhetorical force to render the Commission on Human Rights necessary for the development of humankind. During the formation of the commission, World War II was evoked as a justification for the committee’s existence. Later, the commission’s work on the declaration functioned rhetorically to place World War II in the past.

The Declaration of Human Rights, then, became the line that separated the past from the present.

By recognizing the human rights abuses that had happened, members of the UN were able to turn their backs on World War II and emphasize a new beginning for the world.

At the first session of the Commission of Human Rights in 1946, Assistant Secretary-

General of Social Affairs Henri Laugier said that the UN’s work was not only for the people of the world, but for those who had sacrificed in the name of human rights. He said, “We can also imagine a welcome, grave and serious, from the other side, where the shadows of all the soldiers, sailors, and aviators, all the fighters for the civilian resistance who did on all the battlefields of the world, hoping that right and liberty be re-established all over the world.”26 The UN is purportedly about the future, but Laugier pointed out that its work is beholden to the past.

Laugier described the ghosts of those who fought for human rights, particularly in World War II,

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as a haunting of the present. Failure to move forward in the path to human rights, he implied, would let down those who had died for the cause.

The UN began its examination of universal human rights with much international support, as the documentation of heinous crimes of the holocaust surfaced. John P. Humphrey, director of the Commission of Human Rights, explained, “The reason for this sudden concern was, of course, the traumatic experience through which the world had just passed. One of the causes of the second world war was the cynical, studied, and wholesale violation of human rights in and by Nazi Germany.”27 Many who learned about the trauma and heard Hitler’s deputy

Hermann Goering’s insistence that Germany had the right to act as a sovereign nation were adamant about preventing future atrocities.28 Across the world, nations were becoming more attuned to the rights of individuals, even writing them into their laws and constitutions.29

Increasingly, people looked to the UN to set international guidelines for human rights.30

With much of the world’s attention drawn to the Germany’s human rights violations, members of the UN were able to present the Declaration of Human Rights as a means to prevent these crimes. The Commission on Human Right’s purpose for the document’s was to create a definitive, unifying definition of human rights that would make identifying human rights violations – and motivating citizens around the world to object to them – possible. Laugier evoked the past as evidence of the declaration’s efficacy. He said that if the Declaration had been written prior to the rise of Hitler, “international action would have been mobilized immediately against the first authors and supporters of fascism and nazism.”31 In his speech Laugier returned to the past, but distorted a linear sense of temporality to insert the not-yet-written document into world history. In Laugier’s alternative past, the Declaration of Human Rights had already united citizens of the world to call out injustices. He said, “The human community would have been

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able to stop those who started the war at the moment when they were still weak and the catastrophe would have been avoided.”32 Instead of documenting the horrors of the holocaust,

Laugier offered other members of the commission a version of the past they would have preferred – one in which the war had never come to fruition.

Laugier transferred the Declaration of Human Rights from the future into his imaginary past. Although the document was still unwritten, rhetorically it was already available for uptake in human rights arguments. In Laugier’s scenario, the nonexistent document had the power to draw citizens’ attention to Nazi atrocities even as other methods had failed. Similar to Blair,

Balthrop, and Michel’s study of the use of the past perfect subjunctive in war museums,

Laugier’s description asked listeners to contemplate what the past would have looked like had the atrocities never occurred.33 His argument also reminded listeners that this moment, too, would one day be in the past – and if a cohesive human rights document was not created now, they may similarly return to this time of deliberation and wish they had put mechanisms in place to prevent human rights tragedies.

The commission’s wish to see a world devoid of human rights abuses made them eager to relegate the recent war to the past. The war had been won, but its effects were ongoing. The very establishment of the UN meant to symbolize global commitment to peace; however, the organization had come into being at the time of the war. The Declaration of Human Rights, then, would rhetorically separate the UN’s peace work from the its duties during the war. Laugier emphasized that the commission should prepare a document of rights “as quickly as possible.”34

The earlier the UN put forth a human rights document, Laugier argued, the sooner the world could shed itself of the bad habits of the past and move forward toward peace. The writing

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process ended up taking two years, but this sense of urgency expressed at the beginning never faded from the minds of the commission.

Members of the United Nations Commission of Human Rights depicted the war as evidence of a destructive past, and used the Declaration of Human Rights to draw a discursive line between the world’s past and a better future. At the first commission meeting, Laugier identified World War II as the Commission’s impetus for change: “Ladies and gentlemen, it is a new thing and it is a great thing in the history of humanity that the international community organized after a war which destroyed material wealth and spiritual wealth accumulated by human effort during centuries has constituted an international mechanism to defend the human rights of the world.35” In his statement, Laugier described human development as a positive linear progression that had been interrupted by the war. His statement assumes that human development is a forward movement, as evidenced by the “material and spiritual wealth” developed over the world. In this narrative the war was an unfortunate setback to this progress.

After the destruction of the world’s material and spiritual wealth, humans had no choice but to rebuild. The commission’s narrative, then, followed a destruction and rebirth format – despite the destruction, humans had an opportunity to begin again. Guided by the UN, they could now align themselves on the path toward peace, not war.

Within this act of beginning anew lies an opportunity to redirect human development toward a future in which human rights are highly valued and protected. Because human development follows a linear progression, it was crucial that the UN produce a document that would set the process of rebirth on the right track and guide global redevelopment. Human rights, the commission decided, were the cornerstone upon which the world would come to know peace. A suggested preamble of the UN began, “Whereas: ignorance and contempt of human

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rights have been among the principal causes of the sufferings of humanity and particularly of the massacres which have polluted the earth in two world wars.”36 First, this preamble asserts that the world – polluted by two major wars – has no choice but to start over. Second, it states that failure to attend to human rights was the reason why humanity had ended up on the path to destruction. At this historical interlude, global citizens had the opportunity to accept the path toward world peace embodied by the declaration.

Despite the commission’s efforts to use the Declaration of Human Rights as a rhetorical marker between past and future, World War II played an integral role in the document’s formation. Political utopias are defined by the ills of the society they arise out of. In the UN’s global society, this meant that war and human rights violations would be the antithesis of the better society they were to create. Starting with an examination of the crimes of the holocaust, one of the main questions the UN’s utopia sought to answer was how a system of international intervention could have prevented the tragedy. Many ensuing articles of the declaration dealt specifically with matters of international cooperation. For example, it was decided that information should move freely between borders because increased communication across nations would better alert global citizens of human rights abuses in other nations. In the future the commission hoped to achieve, war and destruction would be eliminated by creating open channels between sovereign borders that had been closed before the war. By turning their backs to the norms and practices of the past, the Commission on Human Rights sought to open the future to new trajectories. Selecting the best direction for the future, though, meant resolving distinct tensions as they arose in the present.

Navigating Contemporary Discourse: Utopia and the Present

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The myriad concerns that captured the UN’s attention from 1946-1948 made drafting utopia a challenge. Opening sovereign borders to political and cultural exchange was to serve a major function in the document, yet the events of 1946-1948 made the politics of national boundaries more present than ever. Throughout the drafting process it remained unclear how the declaration would be implemented in a world that where international peace and cooperation were not the norm. As the Commission on Human Rights deliberated over the declaration’s content and influence, its members adopted a strategy of avoidance when specific, contemporary concerns arose. When addressing the rights of persecuted groups in the present proved divisive, members of the commission from powerful countries began to deflect to a future space in which present concerns were resolved in order to justify their decisions for the document.

A year after the UN proposed the idea of a human rights document, the Commission on

Human Rights referred to the concerns of the present era to consider what elements of human rights should be addressed in an international bill. Records from the ninth committee meeting on

February 1, 1947, reveal the commission’s attempts to accurately define and address the most pressing concerns of their day. The document reads, “Today, men have no need for protection against kings or dictators, but rather against a new form of tyranny: that exercised by the masses and by the state.”37 In 1947, then, the bill of human rights was not to address all possible acts of tyranny, but a particular kind of tyranny that most resonated with members of the commission.

Another contemporary concern that weighed heavily on the commission was the question of how humans’ rights to a nationality could be enforced amid the shifting borders of Europe.

Colonial Hodgson of Australia reminded the commission of the Paris Peace Treaties that were to be signed in February. “Some of them contained territorial claims, the consequence of which would be the displacement of hundreds of thousands of persons who had, for example, their right

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of nationality. Application of the rights under discussion had to be considered with regard to them.”38 Due to this pressing concern, nationality became a key feature of the human rights document. Although the document appealed to universal community, the right to nationality was clearly noted in subsequent drafts. Early on, individuals who were deprived of a nationality were said to belong to the UN.

A persistent question that the commission faced was exactly where the principles of the declaration would play themselves out. Of course, the Declaration of Human Rights was supposed to do its work on a global stage, but the particulars were murky. Initially, the UN was regarded as a “watchdog” over human rights.39 The method for enforcement was unclear, but it was generally accepted that the UN would call forth an international intervention in the case of human rights violations. This posed a major problem, as the UN required support from the international community to have influence in human rights implementation. As an organization where membership was voluntary, the UN had little to no sovereignty over individual nations.

The Drafting Committee’s first session report in 1947 suggested that nations or leaders who were found to have violated human rights would be “liable to expulsion from the organization under article six of the charter.” 40 If this punitive action were taken, though, it would not necessarily stop the violation, but simply separate the offending nation from the international community the

UN sought to establish.

At this time the drafting committee had named the document an “International Bill of

Human Rights” and many of its provisions emphasized the establishment of an international community. Unlike the final document, the language used in this draft was compulsory. For example, Article 2 said that “Every state is, by international law, under an obligation to ensure” that its laws allow humans to enjoy the rights and freedoms outlined in the document, whether

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they are citizens, foreign residents, or stateless individuals.41 This document allocated many human rights duties to existing states. The UN was the presiding authority, but its work would be carried out within the constitutions and laws of sovereign states. The UN had no claim to the spaces in which the spread of human rights must happen but the drafters hoped that its principles would still be carried into those spaces.

Initially, the human rights document was to be published concurrently with a designated system of implementation. The drafting committee addressed the issue of implementation at the end of the first session report. The document stated that the emphasis on implementation was drawn from the resolution of the Economic and Social Council in June 1946, which requested that the Commission on Human Rights submit suggestions for implementation at an early date.42

Although the report acknowledged they spent little time on the matter, the committee did suggest that the UN establish and International Court of Human Rights. The suggestion stated that “The court shall have jurisdiction to hear and determine all disputes concerning the rights of citizenship and enjoyment of human rights and fundamental freedoms provided for in the

Declaration of Human Rights.”43 This court would serve as an authority that individuals or groups could petition for redress from the nations in which they resided. Once established, the court could arbitrate human rights violations in real time. It would serve as an embodiment of the utopian dream – not just in the minds of world citizens, but in the real practices of identifying and punishing criminals.

The possibility of an International Court on Human Rights depended on the existence of individuals whose judgment would transcend the politics of their home country. This “body of independent judges” would be selected by the United Nations based on their ability to represent universal human rights.44 Even as the UN touted universal judgement, its members

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acknowledged the impossibility of removing officials from their nationalities. While the documents suggested that humankind would one day be united into a “human family” it became impossible to deny the political motivations of representatives in the present. In 1946, the commission had deliberated over whether or not the drafting committee should be comprised of representatives from sovereign governments or individual experts who would think apart from their own communities. Representative Nicolai Kriukov initially suggested that the commission find individuals who could lead. The report went on to state that after being questioned, “Mr.

Kriukov answered that in his opinion, it would be difficult for any government to find a person who would be separate from the masses, or who might not be closely linked with his government.”45 It was eventually decided that the drafters would be nominated by their own countries and approved by the UN. The conflict between universality and national sovereignty continued throughout the drafting process, as the hope for a non-biased “human family” proved impossible to find in the present.

In regards to the International Court of Human Rights, it was generally accepted that UN member states would “comply with the judgment of the Court in any case to which the state is a party and with any order which the court may make against it.”46 That is, nation-states who belonged to the UN would be required to implement decrees made by the international court.

This idea would give the UN international clout, but it posed problems for most of the nations represented by members of the commission. Under the 1947 draft of the document, article 27 granted any citizen the right to petition the UN for redress of grievances.47 This sentiment did not make the final draft; however, the UN Commission of Human Rights received an influx of petitions before the document was even written. These appeals became a subject of discussion at the commission’s second session in 1947, when Indian representative Hansa Mehta remarked

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that “the communications received from individuals and organizations on matters pertaining to the work of the commission would be of great interest to all members” and requested their circulation to the commission.48 Most notably, W.E.B. Du Bois and the NAACP petitioned the

UN on behalf of African Americans, asking for the commission to intervene in the United States’ discriminatory racial practices.49

Du Bois’ petition seemed to model the UN’s plans for human rights (oppressed citizens granted the UN authority to look over their case); however, the plea challenged the authority of the United States, whose leadership was fully ensconced in the UN. The Soviet Union highlighted the petition as evidence of the moral inferiority of the Unites States, but most representatives from powerful governments regarded the influx of petitions as a potential threat to national sovereignty. According to Lauren, “The widespread publicity given to this petition of

Du Bois by journalists from around the world who believed that they were witnessing an extremely important event demonstrated just how embarrassing such issues might be for other governments as well if given attention.”50 Yet Du Bois’ petition was an example of what the UN could hope to accomplish. His call to address the violation African Americans’ rights built a sense of international community around a shared sense of oppression.51 This was not a victory for the officials of the Human Rights Commission, as public scrutiny had now shifted from Nazi

Germany to the very contemporary systems of oppression that plagued their own countries. The commission responded to Du Bois’ complaint by stating that their human rights work dealt with universals, not his particular case, but that over time those universals would attend to his very specific grievances.52 This response marked a larger shift in the commission’s goal for human rights. Once concerned with implementation, the commission gradually came to emphasize universals that they hoped would organically develop into international norms sans enforcement.

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The anxieties of the present were reflected in both language and content. In 1947, the

Human Rights Commission wrote a report to the Economic and Social Council regarding their latest draft of the Declaration of Human Rights in which the wording of the document was called into question. Colonial W.R. Hodgson, representative of Australia, stated that the articles in the declaration were confusing because they sounded both declaratory and mandatory. The report states, “He felt that as it had been agreed that the declaration poses no legal obligation and requires no measures for implementation, it should be drafted in declaratory form only.”53

Because the declaration had originally been regarded as a bill of rights with distinct measures for integration into formal law, the drafting committee dedicated much of their time to rewriting the articles. The word “should” was taken from many of the articles in favor of less compulsory language. In the same report, US representative Eleanor Roosevelt submitted eleven articles for members who “would prefer a shorter and less technical Declaration.”54 Where before the articles had been intricately written to cover specific details, the revision process was dedicated to truncating each statement.

Over the time it took to draft the declaration, its purpose became less about addressing the concerns of citizens post World War II and more about setting the conditions that would lead to a better future. The commission’s handling of international matters, particularly the petitions of oppressed groups, demarcated a turn from implementing laws to developing utopic standards that would gradually improve the lives of individuals in the future. Coming together to draft the

Declaration of Human Rights did not fundamentally alter the way world leaders acted toward each other or their constituents. In fact, two days after the declaration was passed, Andrei Y.

Vishinsky, chief Soviet Delegate to the United Nations, accused UN officials of waging a political war against the Soviet Union.55 Instead, the conditions of the present directed the

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Commission on Human Rights’ attention toward an imagined space in the future when these conflicts would be resolved.

Looking Forward: Utopia and the Future

As the language of the Declaration became vaguer, its vision for the future became more clear. While concerns of the present – enforcement, border disputes, and racial oppression – faded into the background, the UN was able to refocus on what a harmonious future would entail. The appeal of utopia was that it allowed members of the commission to depict the precise changes they wished to see in the world without specifying the mechanisms for inducing such changes. The commission’s ideas for implementation were largely dropped from the final document, but this did not mean that the drafters gave up on the idea of human rights. In his analysis of Henri de Saint-Simon’s utopia, Ricoeur described utopia as a dream that wants to be realized. On the utopian vision he wrote, “It directs itself toward reality; it shatters reality.”56 The

Universal Declaration became the mechanism for change by reorienting its audience’s interests toward international cooperation. Through the drafting process, the commission was able to define a cosmopolitan utopia and imagine the conditions for its existence.

The idea of the Declaration as a guideline that would help usher in a peaceful, united future was present even in the commission’s first meeting in 1946. Laugier told the commission,

“In the reconstruction of the world, the material tasks are most important, but the effort of all town planners, of architects, or doctors, will only assume its real significance if humanity starts again to have confidence in its destiny.”57 Laugier acknowledged that peace would not result from democratic principles alone, but cast these principles as absolutely essential to the growth and development of human beings. Thus, the Declaration of Human Rights acquired significance

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due to its ability to direct humans’ attention toward a utopian future. He continued, “I pray that your actions and work may be a permanent guide for men of good will, who are looking toward a better future, and that they will show them the way, like a guiding star.”58 Laugier’s wish for the document was that it would seamlessly connect men (and presumably women) to a future in which all nations are truly united. He kept the guidelines for success simple: if humankind follows the path laid out for them in the declaration, the world would eventually come to know peace. Knowing this, the Commission on Human Rights undertook a task of utmost importance.

While the drafters could not predict when this utopic world would exist, they knew that it would be recognizable by the absence of war. Eleanor Roosevelt stated that the UN’s primary objective was “keeping the peace of the world by helping human beings to live together happily and contentedly.”59 By her reasoning, the Declaration of Human Rights would usher in an era of peace by outlining a set of standards that would allow all humans to live their lives to their full potential without infringing on the rights and freedoms of others. Additionally, the document would command a universal respect for humanity. The goal was to direct citizens of the world to recognize their shared humanity. To this end, article 1 in a potential draft of the declaration stated, “All men, being members of one family are free, possess equal dignity and rights, and shall regard each other as brothers.”60 If humans came to see themselves as a global whole united by the rights bestowed upon them by the UN, there would be no reason to commit acts of violence or war toward others.

An inherent tension in this method of thinking was the distinction between national sovereignty, individual freedom, and the collective whole. At the time it was established, members of the commission made it clear that the rights of the individual were the primary justification for the document.61 Emphasizing common sense and a history of political

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philosophy highlighted the tension between individual freedoms and the collective good. In the

July 1947 draft of the declaration, article 2 stated that the point of society “is to enable all men to develop, fully and in security, their physical, mental, and moral personality, without some being sacrificed for the sake of others.”62 This statement seemed to contradict article three, which insisted that citizens must accept “the burdens and sacrifices demanded for the common good.”63

At this point in the drafting process, members of the commission sought to make a distinction between individual and social rights. Canadian representative John P. Humphrey wrote that the disagreements were not only between communists and capitalists. For example, United Kingdom representative Charles Dukes considered it impossible to grant the individual complete liberty.

Rene Cassin, the French representative, thought that the commission had not given enough thought to social rights.64 Roosevelt, on the other hand, considered individual rights to be the foundation of the document.

In the final declaration, these appeals to social rights were limited to article 29, which briefly discussed the duties of citizens to respect the laws in place to ensure collective freedom.65

The distinction of the bill was articulated by Ronald Lebeau of Belgium stated that the basis of the bill was “simply the human person, that is to say the human person participating in social life.”66 The UN’s utopic vision revolved around the freedom of individuals to develop their full potentials without undue influence from the state. In an idealized future one can assume that the individual’s “full potential” will necessarily promote the common good. A utopia based on individual liberty need not account for social responsibilities, as these are secondary concerns that should naturally fall into place when peace has been obtained.

Although social duties still played an important role in all modern democracies, the future according to the UN would be determined by individual liberties. As Vladislav Ribnikar,

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representative of Yugoslavia pointed out, “We were at present in a transitional period. The

Commission should regard the social and political ideals of the middle classes as those of another age, and not look on certain principles as eternal.”67 The usefulness of utopia was that seemingly entwined political ideals such as individual and social liberties could be separated.

Ribnikar described 1947 as this moment of separation. By clearly laying out the principles that they hoped would define the future, the Commission on Human Rights induced this moment of change that would alter humankind’s priorities moving forward. While other political ideologies would fade into the past, the ideals of democratic liberalism would persevere.

A second tension existed between nationalism and universalism. The commission envisioned a time when humans were united as a global family. The committee’s emphasis on free access to information, education, and cultural and scientific advancement granted importance to the free flow of ideas and values across national borders. In spite of this, the commission never denied the existence of sovereign nations in their future, and even made the right to nationality an article in the declaration. This decision for the future had much to do with the ensuing Cold War. At this time, the Soviet Union was looking to acquire more European land in order to spread their communist principles. No matter how utopian, a borderless world united by an overlaying ideology would have seemed dangerous to representatives backing democratic capitalism.

The UN’s work on utopia was complicated by its need to safely navigate between supporting transnational movement and re-instating the legitimacy of nationhood. Representative

Mora of Uruguay argued, “Freedom of movement ought to be included among the fundamental freedom of the individual. Each person should be free to move about within a country and to leave that country, subject to the limitations imposed by the immigration laws of other

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countries.”68 Mora describes freedom of movement – the ability of the individual to cross national borders – as an essential freedom for the new, cosmopolitan era. The future of geographical space thus retains its segmented nature, but its borders become more porous and can theoretically be crossed by anyone. The second clause of Mora’s assertion reveals the difficulty of enforcing such a utopic gesture. Most countries imposed limits on immigration and visiting rights. Additionally, poverty and infrastructure left many individuals rooted to a particular place. Mora’s statement was meant not for his time, but for the UN’s utopic time. By deflecting free border-movement to sometime in the future, sovereign governments involved in the UN did not need to alter their laws to allow for easier migration. The first half of Mora’s claim holds freedom of movement as an essential, utopian freedom, which the second half deflects possible confrontations over the freedom’s non-materiality.

Certain conditions must necessarily exist if free movement across borders is to work out like the UN suggested. The UN’s rhetoric of movement suggested a sort of equilibrium where most spaces are about equal in desirability. The commission upheld the necessity of freedom of movement but did not include any clauses mentioning basic equalities of place. This lack of attention to inequality bothered Yugoslavia’s representative, who said, that the constitutions of capitalist countries that had influenced the UN’s principles “were based on the assumption that races and nations did not have equal rights.”69 This concern failed to resonate with the many delegates eager to promote democratic capitalism who assumed that the basic inequalities would be resolved over time. By this condition, freedom of movement can only be fully realized in a utopian future.

In a similar vein, the final declaration never mentions war. In the last commission meeting, the delegation of Ecuador stated that, “Nazism and fascism having been destroyed, so

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had the brutal totalitarian States. The United Nations should strive for a new democratic internationalism which would have as its objective not war or conflicts, but the establishment of a lasting peace.”70 Although war is absent from the declaration passed in 1948, earlier manifestations of the document did plan for it. In 1947, Article 4 of a potential draft made exceptions for state infringement upon individual liberties in the event of war or national emergency.71 As the document became more future-oriented, talk of war and exceptions in the name of war ceased. A potential line of the declaration’s preamble reads, “human freedom and dignity cannot be respected as long as war and the threat of war are not abolished.”72 Subsequent drafts began with the assumption that the freedoms outlined would only become fully accessible once war was no longer a threat to human existence. The declaration’s reasoning was circular: the abolishment of war would allow for human freedoms to be realized, and the realization and gradual adoption of these fundamental rights would bring about an era of peace. One would be unrecognizable without the other; however, only the list of fundamental rights remained in the declaration. If the Commission of Human Rights was to retain a positive view of the future, the abolishment of war would have to be taken for granted. The enjoyment of essential freedoms moved into the spotlight, while war and abuse of freedoms were relegated to a supposedly bygone era.

Mora described the bill’s nature as increasingly international. “Hitherto, only States had been subject to international law, but now the individual should have access to international tribunals which would pass judgment on individuals as well as States.”73 At the final meeting of the commission, the Declaration of Human Rights was described as a major breakthrough in the human development. This document stated, “Many representatives had stressed the historical importance of the new declaration, which the United Nations was about to offer to humanity.”74

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Despite its lack of material implications, the declaration was largely expected to usher in a new beginning.

Debates over the document’s inherently utopic nature persevered till the end.

Radovanovic in particular expressed his disappointment in its lack of material application. He said, “The historical development of the capitalistic society had imposed on the individual unfavourable economic conditions. Therefore, a simple declaration of those rights without providing assurances of adequate material conditions in which they could be enjoyed would be illusory.”75 Radovanovic’s dissent mirrors a key Marxist critique of utopia, that emphasizing a brighter future distracts citizens from the poor conditions of their present. He argued that the document did not take responsibility for bettering the material conditions of the humans it claimed to protect, particularly those who could be considered victims of capitalist societies.

Furthermore, he argued that the declaration was not as progressive as its proponents claimed it to be. Most of the key freedoms outlined already existed in constitutions around the world. In effect, “the declaration appeared to be an instrument of international codification rather than an instrument which opened a new and brighter future for the individual in the vast field of social rights.”76 Radovanovic claimed that the commission’s vision of utopia was quite conservative – it simply affirmed the values of dominant ideologies.

Representatives of democratic capitalist nations countered that the declaration would have material implications in the present. Carrera Andrade of Ecuador agreed that “some of the articles had already become part of the Constitutions of many Member States.” He felt that this

“gave added strength to the declaration; it was proof that that international document was based on political realities and not on utopias.”77 Andrade argued that the articles’ integration into national constitutions pointed to the material implications of the document. In his statement he

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referred to utopia in its negative connotation, which assumes that it cannot have an effect on existing reality. Andrade’s description of utopia was incomplete, as a key feature of many political utopian theories is its ability to induce change by disrupting dominant ideologies. In this version of utopia, the Declaration of Human Rights would be considered the impetus that served to redirect its audience’s vision toward sustainable practices for the future.

Regardless of whether the declaration ultimately had a material impact, its utopian function is hard to deny. The UN’s prioritization of a better future remains evident in its programs, which stress democratic education and investment in development. In the final deliberations Andrade said, “Throughout many centuries of political struggle to bring about human unity, the climax had now been reached with the preparation of the document in which 58 nations had expressed their had expressed their common ideal and their identity of thoughts regarding fundamental rights.”78 While members of the commission took different sides on its implications for humanity, all described the document as the foundation upon which future international relations would be built. The wording of the document was left vague and open to interpretation in the future, which helped the commission bridge many concerns of the present.

For the UN, utopia served a rhetorical function. With no real method of enforcement, the

Commission on Human Rights had to rely on the persuasive power of their document to effect change. The role of the declaration was one of redirection: adjusting its audience’s views to see possibilities for a cosmopolitan future.

Conclusion: The Complex Function of Temporality in Utopia

Today, the Declaration of Human Rights is considered one of the defining achievements of the United Nations. Lauren wrote, “Despite many efforts to present and portray the document

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as a ‘mere’ statement of principle with no legally binding authority at all, the vision proclaimed struck a chord among the peoples of the world and rapidly began to take on a life of its own.”79

The UN sought to redirect global citizens’ visions toward universal human rights, and scholars like Lauren consider the task successful. Not all scholars are quite so convinced, and the question of influence persists to this day. In addition to critics, the UN itself holds discussions on how to exert a more material influence on the laws of sovereign nations.80 It is clear that the world has not reached the peaceful, cosmopolitan future outlined in the Universal Declaration of Human

Rights; however, evaluating the document by its measureable effects may be beside the point.

The UN’s legitimization depended on a utopic process of becoming. By piecing together elements of past, present, and future in the document’s creation, the Human Rights Commission of the UN created a processual document that emphasized human movement toward the future.

In this document time could be manipulated to best serve the UN’s purpose. The positive attributes of each temporal mode were recalled in the document, while obstacles to peace were relegated to a space outside of the UN’s utopia. As the drafters cleared away concerns of the present, their idealized vision for the future was clarified and imbued with a sense of purpose.

This prioritization of the future is rhetorical. The purpose of the Declaration of Human

Rights was not to induce change in the present but to discursively construct an alternative sense of time that would reorient human thought and action toward the future. The document simultaneously critiques the present and replaces it with a utopian cosmopolitan ideology. This replacement does not happen only in the future; the past is called into the present as justification for the invented future. Utopia, then, is a rhetorical process of critique and substitution in which current societal flaws are called out and replaced by new possibilities for being. Such temporal shifts like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights merit attention from rhetorical scholars as

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we attempt to account for the sense of temporality in ordering political history. The change pursued is not a quick material switch but a gradual utopian takeover of norms and practices that must remain in the past. Past, present, and future are combined to create a sense of time in which the hope for something better becomes the main instigator of change throughout the world.

1 United Nations General Assembly. Resolutions Adopted by the General Assembly During its Third Session. http://www.un.org/documents/ga/res/3/ares3.htm 2 United Nations Economic and Social Council. Commission on Human Rights, First Session: Summary Record of the Ninth Meeting E/CN.4/SR.9 (February 1, 1947) 4. 3 See, for example, Eric Aoki, Greg Dickinson, and Brian L. Ott. “Memory and the West Reflections on Place, Practice, and Performance.” Cultural Studies to Critical Methodology.13:1 (2013); Greg Dickinson, Greg, Carole Blair, and Ott, Brian L. Places of Public Memory: The Rhetoric of Museums and Memorials. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2010; Carole Blair, V. William Balthrop, and Neil Michel. “Mood of the Material: War Memory and Imagining Otherwise” Cultural Studies: Critical Methodologies. 13:1 (2013), 6-20; and Brent Allen Saindon. “A Doubled Heterotopia: Shifting Spatial and Visual Symbolism in the Jewish Museum Berlin’s Development” Quarterly Journal of Speech. 98:1 (2012), 24-48. 4 Sarah Sharma, In the Meantime: Temporality and Cultural Politics. Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2014. 5 Robert Asen. Reflections on the Role of Rhetoric in Public Policy. Rhetoric & Public Affairs, 13:1 (2010), 136. 6 Asen 127. 7 Johannes Morsink. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights. (University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc., 2004), 2. 8 Morsick 2. A full list and description of the nine members of the Commission on Human Rights can be found on the United Nations Website: 9 Morsink 9. 10 The United Nations. “Establishment of the Committee” Drafting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. < http://research.un.org/en/undhr/draftingcommittee#s-lg-box-wrapper-3512507> 11 Morsink 12. 12 Bradford Vivian. Witnessing Time: Rhetorical Form, Public Culture, and Popular Historical Education. Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 44:3 (2014), 216. 13 Ruth Levitas. The Concept of Utopia. (Great Britain: Simon & Schuster International Group, 1990), 2. 14 Levitas. 2. 15 Georges Sorel. Reflections on Violence. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, Inc. 2004. 16 Sorel, 50. 17 Paul Ricoeur. Lectures on Ideology and Utopia. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 16. 18 Ernst Bloch. The Principle of Hope, vol. 1. Cambridge, MIT Press, 1986.

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19 Karl Mannheim. Ideology and Utopia. Trans. Louis Wirth and Edward Shills. (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1936), 246. 20 United Nations: Universal Declaration of Human Rights. “History of the Document.” http://www.un.org/en/sections/universal-declaration/history-document/index.html 21 John Lewis Gaddis. The Cold War. New York: The Penguin Press (2005), 10. 22 Gaddis 11. 23 Gaddis 98. 24 Gaddis 17. 25 Paul Ricoeur and George H. Taylor. Lectures on Ideology and Utopia. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 287. 26 United Nations Economic and Social Council. Commission on Human Rights, First Meeting E/HR/6 April 29, 1946, 2. 27 John P. Humphrey. Human Rights and the United Nations: A Great Adventure. (Dobbs Ferry, New York: Transnational Publishers, Inc. 1984), 6. 28 Paul Gordon Lauren. The Evolution of International Human Rights: Visions Seen. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998) 210-211. 29 Lauren 212-213 30 Johannes Morsink. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights. (University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc. 2004), 2. 31 United Nations Economic and Social Council. Commission on Human Rights, First Meeting E/HR/6 April 29, 1946, 3. 32 United Nations Economic and Social Council. Commission on Human Rights, First Meeting E/HR/6 April 29, 1946, 3. 33 Blair, Carole, Balthrop, V. William, and Michel, Neil. “Mood of the Material: War Memory and Imagining Otherwise” Cultural Studies: Critical Methodologies. 13:1 (2013), 6-20. 34 United Nations Economic and Social Council. Commission on Human Rights Summary Record of Meeting, Third Meeting. E/HR/9. April 30, 1946, 3. 35 United Nations Economic and Social Council. Commission on Human Rights, First Meeting E/HR/6 April 29, 1946, 1. 36 United Nations Economic and Social Council. Commission on Human Rights: Drafting Committee on an International Bill of Human Rights, First Session. E/CN/4/21 July 1, 1947, 49. 37 United Nations Economic and Social Council. Commission on Human Rights, First Session: Summary Record of the Ninth Meeting E/CN.4/SR.9 (February 1, 1947) 3. 38 United Nations Economic and Social Council. Commission on Human Rights, First Session: Summary Record of the Ninth Meeting E/CN.4/SR.9 (February 1, 1947) 4. 39 United Nations Economic and Social Council. Commission on Human Rights of the Social and Economic Council: Third Meeting. April 30, 1946 E/HR/9 page 3 40 United Nations Economic and Social Council. Commission on Human Rights: Drafting Committee on an International Bill of Human Rights, First Session. E/CN/4/21 July 1, 1947, 33. 41 United Nations Economic and Social Council. Commission on Human Rights: Drafting Committee on an International Bill of Human Rights, First Session. E/CN/4/21 July 1, 1947, 30. 42 United Nations Economic and Social Council. Commission on Human Rights: Drafting Committee on an International Bill of Human Rights, First Session. E/CN/4/21 July 1, 1947, 87. 43 United Nations Economic and Social Council. Commission on Human Rights: Drafting Committee on an International Bill of Human Rights, First Session. E/CN/4/21 July 1, 1947, 89.

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44 United Nations Economic and Social Council. Commission on Human Rights: Drafting Committee on an International Bill of Human Rights, First Session. E/CN/4/21 July 1, 1947, 90. 45 United Nations Economic and Social Council. Commission on Human Rights of the Social and Economic Council: Summary Record of Meetings. E/HR/9 April 30, 1946, 1. 46 United Nations Economic and Social Council. Commission on Human Rights: Drafting Committee on an International Bill of Human Rights, First Session. E/CN/4/21 July 1, 1947, 90. 47 United Nations Economic and Social Council. Commission on Human Rights: Drafting Committee on an International Bill of Human Rights, First Session. E/CN/4/21 July 1, 1947, 70. 48 United Nations Economic and Social Council. Commission on Human Rights: Summary Record of the Second Meeting E/CN.4/SR.2 (January 29, 1947), 6. 49 W.E.B. Du Bois and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. 1947. An Appeal to the World: A Statement on the Denial of Human Rights to Minorities in the Case of Citizens of Negro Descent in the United States of America and an Appeal to the United Nations for Redress. New York: NAACP. 50 Lauren 227. 51Lauren 225. 52 Lauren 225. 53 United Nations Economic and Social Council Official Records. Report of the Commission on Human Rights Third Year: Sixth Session. New York: 1948, 19. 54 United Nations Economic and Social Council Official Records. Report of the Commission on Human Rights Third Year: Sixth Session. New York: 1948, 21. 55Thomas J. Hamilton. “U.N. Assembly Ends Its Paris Meeting; Backs South Korea. The New York Times. December 12, 1948. 56 Paul Ricoeur Lectures on Ideology and Utopia. Trans. George H. Taylor. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 289. 57 United Nations Economic and Social Council Official Records. Report of the Commission on Human Rights Third Year: Sixth Session. New York: 1948, 2. 58 United Nations Economic and Social Council. Commission on Human Rights of the Economic and Social Council: Summary Record of Meetings. E/HR/6 April 29, 1946, 3. 59 United Nations Economic and Social Council. Commission on Human Rights of the Economic and Social Council: Summary Record of Meetings. E/HR/6 April 29, 1946, 3. 60 United Nations Economic and Social Council. Commission on Human Rights: Drafting Committee on an International Bill of Human Rights, First Session. E/CN/4/21 July 1, 1947, 51. 61 John P. Humphrey. Human Rights and the United Nations: A Great Adventure. Dobbs Ferry, New York: Transnational Publishers, Inc. (1984). 62 United Nations Economic and Social Council. Commission on Human Rights: Drafting Committee on an International Bill of Human Rights, First Session. E/CN/4/21 July 1, 1947, 51. 63 United Nations Economic and Social Council. Commission on Human Rights: Drafting Committee on an International Bill of Human Rights, First Session. E/CN/4/21 July 1, 1947, 51. 64 Humphrey 25. 65 The United Nations. “Universal Declaration of Human Rights” http://www.ohchr.org/EN/UDHR/Documents/UDHR_Translations/eng.pdf. 66 United Nations Economic and Social Council. Commission on Human Rights, First Session: Summary Record of the Ninth Meeting E/CN.4/SR.9 (February 1, 1947) 4.

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67 United Nations Economic and Social Council. Commission of Human Rights: Summary Record of the Eighth Meeting. E/CN.4/SR.8 (January 31, 1947), 4. 68 United Nations Economic and Social Council. Commission of Human Rights: Summary Record of the Eighth Meeting. E/CN.4/SR.8 (January 31, 1947), 3. 69 United Nations: 183 Plenary Meeting. A/PV.183, December 9, 1948, 926. 70 United Nations: 183 Plenary Meeting. A/PV.183, December 9, 1948, 919 71 United Nations Economic and Social Council. Commission on Human Rights: Drafting Committee on an International Bill of Human Rights, First Session. E/CN/4/21 July 1, 1947 page 31. 72 United Nations Economic and Social Council. Commission on Human Rights: Drafting Committee on an International Bill of Human Rights, First Session. E/CN/4/21 July 1, 1947, 49. 73 United Nations Economic and Social Council. Commission of Human Rights: Summary Record of the Eighth Meeting. E/CN.4/SR.8 (January 31, 1947), 3. 74 United Nations: 183 Plenary Meeting. A/PV.183, December 9, 1948, 913. 75 United Nations: 183 Plenary Meeting. A/PV.183, December 9, 1948, 915. 76 United Nations: 183 Plenary Meeting. A/PV.183, December 9, 1948, 913-914. 77 United Nations: 183 Plenary Meeting. A/PV.183, December 9, 1948, 918. 78 United Nations: 183 Plenary Meeting. A/PV.183, December 9, 1948, 918. 79 Paul Gordon Lauren. The Evolution of International Human Rights: Visions Seen. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press (1998), 239. 80 Abdulqawi A. Yusuf. Standard Setting in UNESCO, Volume 1: Normative Action in Education, Science, and Culture. Leiden/Boston: UNESCO Publishing, 2007.

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Chapter 2 Bridging Utopia: Memories of Rhetorical and Material Space in UNESCO’s World Heritage Program

Since its formation in the 12th century, the German city of Dresden has represented many different identities. Initially a cultural hub for Germany and much of early modern Europe, after

World War II it was known as the site of the infamous Dresden bombing, an air raid by U.S. forces that killed approximately 25,000 citizens and destroyed most of the city’s historic architecture. Famously memorialized in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, the Dresden bombing remains controversial: Though the U.S. military claimed it a crucial step toward ending the war, critics argued that the extremely high number of civilian casualties and the fact that the target was a center of art and culture rather than an explicit military base rendered the raid a war crime.1 In addition to debates over wartime morality, the bombing mandated that the city start over; the residents of Dresden now had to rebuild and reconstitute an identity in light of the city’s recent past as a site for prisoners of war and following destruction by allied forces.

Immediately following the war, this new identity would be constituted through communism, as the officials of East Germany set to redesign the city as a socialist utopia; East

German Dresden would act as a materialization of socialist principles through structure and design.2 Much of its destroyed architecture – including Frauenkirche (The Church of Our Lady), the historic church that was once a city landmark, remained in its ruined state while city planners emphasized structures for mass housing and public demonstration.3 After German reunification in 1990, the city was once again reconstituted as a democratic, cosmopolitan hub, and rebuilding projects, including Frauenkirche, commenced in the early 1990s. In 2004, UNESCO accepted

Dresden Elbe Valley, the city and its surrounding river and valleys, as a World Heritage Site, categorizing it as an international example of urban development.

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Although the reconstruction of Dresden as a socialist or democratic cosmopolitan utopia merited different consequences, both projects imagined Dresden to meet the needs of people outside of the city limits. Both times following World War II, the city was rebuilt for an international audience to serve as a model of development for a global cause: the international rise of communism or renewed interest in cosmopolitan, democratic culture. These international audiences were identifiable only through principle: what was best for the city was measured through how well Dresden matched the political ideal it supposedly represented. Public overseers, in these two cases the East German city planners and UNESCO’s World Heritage

Representatives, used this political ideal as a backdrop for changes to Dresden.

The needs of Dresden’s international audience, constituted through UNESCO’s cosmopolitan rhetoric, clashed with the needs of its citizens, those who occupied the actual, physical space. In 2009, just five years after it attained World Heritage status, Dresden Elbe

Valley was delisted by UNESCO – an international slight that had happened only once before in

Oman.4 The strife between Dresden’s national and international needs and the cause of its delisting was a bridge: a new building project meant to mitigate traffic congestion that UNESCO claimed would decimate the city’s view of the natural landscape. The fact that the majority of

Dresden’s citizens supported the bridge project was inconsequential to UNESCO because in

UNESCO’s view, the space had a responsibility to an international audience.

UNESCO’s efforts to recast national sites in an international light demonstrates the difficult process of translation that must take place in the materialization of utopia. In this chapter I make the shift from “no place” to “good place”: UNESCO’s methods for designing utopic, cosmopolitan places in the physical world. Utopia, I argue, is not realized as much as it is utilized. Utopia remains an elusive fantasy; however, the vision it represents can still promote

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real, material change. Through its World Heritage Program, UNESCO works to materialize its utopian vision of a cosmopolitan future. The program appropriates space and restructures it to mirror its vision. Once suitably transformed into a World Heritage Site, each of the spaces

UNESCO recreates is meant to stand in as material proof of cosmopolitanism’s potential in the world. The sites are thus removed from day-to-day life within their surrounding sovereignties to exist instead as capsules of utopian ideals.

The reconstitution of space for an international purpose had clear implications for the space’s inhabitants, who were no longer the city’s central concern. The daily acts of Dresden’s citizens and politicians became somewhat stunted under UNESCO’s regulations, which attempted to keep the city and surrounding valley encapsulated in a utopian vision of past and future. To understand this disconnect between UNESCO’s Dresden and the Dresden experienced by its inhabitants, I analyze the site’s changing cityscape in accordance with UNESCO’s utopian vision. I argue that Dresden’s unique function as a model of development for multiple ideologies necessitates a processual study of how its structural changes are envisioned, debated, and rejected or enforced. To do so, I examine Dresden’s nomination files, the correspondence between UNESCO and representatives of the Free County of Saxony (Dresden’s county), and media coverage of the site to determine the World Heritage Program’s utopian principles, the uptake of Dresden as a World Heritage Site, and the disputes between the City Council and the

World Heritage Committee over the proposed bridge.5 First, though, it is important to understand the implications of UNESCO’s concept of world heritage.

UNESCO and World Heritage

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A product of World War II, UNESCO came into being almost concurrently with the U.N.

Founding members of the U.N. were horrified by the mass destruction of cultural properties and sought to devise a system that would protect historical places in the future. Francesco Francioni, professor of international law and UNESCO scholar, wrote, “After the unprecedented cultural destruction wrought by the Second World War - with its new method of ‘carpet bombing’ and the systematic looting of art objects in occupied territory - it was only natural that the first priority of UNESCO was the adoption of an instrument for the protection of cultural property in the event of armed conflict.”6 Like the United Nations itself, UNESCO’s mission developed from its founders’ reactions to the recent horrors of World War II. Sovereign nations acting alone did not have the power to protect their unique cultural heritage from nations at war. UNESCO’s first project, then, was to create an international system for historical preservation.

While the United Nations is meant to deal with the notion of peace more generally,

UNESCO focuses specifically on development through educational and scientific advancement.

UNESCO claims to connect human advancements across the globe into a universal body of human knowledge and culture. According to UNESCO, international commitment to shared human advancement will not be immediate, but the organization claims to build a foundation of global citizenship through a democratic education that crosses international borders.7 One route to democratic education is through the World Heritage program, which UNESCO introduced as a way to identity and protect places worthy of international memory. To date, the national and local curators of UNESCO’s 1,052 World Heritage Sites follow a series of rules and practices for sustainable development of the site in exchange for UNESCO funding and promotion. The program is sold as a committed partnership between local and international: UNESCO brings together an international coalition to protect the sites, and the area’s local citizens and

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government adhere to a set of principles meant to ensure the place’s success as a site of cosmopolitan memory.

The end result of such a commitment is clearly defined by UNESCO: democratic education and respect for other cultures will eliminate the impulse for nations to wage war against one another. UNESCO’s constitution states, “Ignorance of each other’s ways and lives has been a common cause, throughout the history of mankind, of that suspicion and mistrust between the peoples of the world through which their differences have all too often broken into war.”8 UNESCO’s goals were synonymous with those of its parent organization, the United

Nations: to promote a global commitment to democratic principles. However, the practices designed to garner this global commitment have met international critique. Global law scholar

Elizabeth Betsy Keough argues that due to vague selection criteria and the almost complete power of the seven-member World Heritage over the distribution of resources, the program can easily favor “some projects over others for ideological, political, or pecuniary reasons.”9

Although UNESCO shares power with sovereign and local governments and economies, the organization still wields significant power over international memory, and its practices merit scrutiny. UNESCO’s methods to counter such critiques are similar to those of the Commission on Human Rights. While there may be difficulties now, UNESCO argues that their efforts will be worth it as the world approaches a cosmopolitan utopia in which citizens of the world are united in shared appreciation of memory and culture.

Space, Real and Imagined: The Uptake of Utopian Cosmopolitanism in International Memory

UNESCO’s programs are presumably cosmopolitan endeavors; they seek to transcend space to unite world citizens in a shared humanity. Political scholar David Held defines

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cosmopolitanism as a search for a morality not bound by nationality. A cosmopolitan sensibility,

Held explains, holds individual citizens as the ultimate units of moral concern.10 National citizenship is deemphasized in favor of a shared human morality; human rights are said to outweigh citizenship rights, but how to replace national sovereignty in the minds of world citizens remains up for debate. Political philosopher Seyla Benhabib describes cosmopolitanism in terms of borders. According to Benhabib, nations are marked by borders that define who is a citizen and who is not, but these borders are porous: they can be crossed, redrawn, or dissolved.11

In this understanding of cosmopolitanism, the spatial boundaries that make up our notions of cosmopolitanism are made fluid by time. Humans separated by sovereign boundaries can still share a connection through the possibility of eventual contact with one another.

Cosmopolitanism, then, is oriented toward the future. It promises an eventual recognition of shared humanity due to the instability of national borders over time.

Because it is always out of reach, cosmopolitanism depends on human commitment to a united future. Rhetorical scholar Alessandra Beasley Von Burg highlights cosmopolitan imagination as a pathway to new modes of thinking and being.12 To change, she argues, one must first imagine there is an alternative to the present. Von Burg’s cosmopolitan imagination is an act of redefinition. Her work describes the redefinition of citizenship as the pathway to change. Similarly, the pathway to UNESCO’s success could be its leaders’ abilities to reconstitute national ownership of space, to reimagine historical and environmental sites as jointly owned by both the country and the world. While Von Burg’s account of cosmopolitan imagination is based in discourses of democratic citizenship, my case study of UNESCO reemphasizes the meaning of physical space to cosmopolitan pursuits. Cosmopolitan studies need to attend not only to discourse but also to the reshaping of physical space to foster

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international connections. Public memory scholarship offers a method for this shift from cosmopolitan discourse to cosmopolitan space.

UNESCO’s World Heritage program sets out to transform national sites into places of cosmopolitan meaning. In this process, national memories become redefined as memories of the world. To understand how these sites are imbued with cosmopolitan significance, it is essential to grasp the difference between place and space in rhetorical scholarship. The transformation of space into place forms a cornerstone of memory studies, a subdivision of rhetoric. According to

Greg Dickinson, Carole Blair, and Brian L. Ott, place is a bordered, recognizable segment of more generalized space.13 Space becomes place through discourse, arrangement, and memory. In other words, places retain a discursively constructed significance: they can hold memories, make cultural claims, and define and border national identity. Space and place studies describe how physical spaces are infused with human meaning.

Defining memory in terms of space and place demonstrates how space is bordered. The creators of memorial places draw boundaries around physical space to determine what is and what is not a part of the shared memory. Primarily, memory studies have structured their analysis around space. Through my study of UNESCO’s places of cosmopolitan memory, I find that memory places are bordered not only spatially but temporally. It is well understood that memorial sites hold vestiges of the past; however, rhetorical theory does not adequately attend to how rhetorical agents attempt to extend this historical narrative through time to reach the future.

Dickinson, Blair, and Ott claim that public memory is about the present. They write, “[G]roups tell their pasts to themselves and others as ways of understanding, valorizing, justifying, excusing, or subverting conditions or beliefs of their current moment.”14 My goal is to better

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understand the pull of the future in human efforts to narrate the past. The stories we tell about the past determine not only the anxieties of the present, but our hopes and fears for the future.

The entanglement of space and time can help explain how UNESCO recalibrates historical narratives to better suit its cosmopolitan aims. Understanding world heritage requires an orientation toward temporality, which communication scholar Sarah Sharma defines as the lived experience of time. She elaborates, “The temporal is not a general sense of time particular to an epoch of history but a specific experience of time that is structured in specific political and economic contexts.”15 Unlike a more general sense of time passing, a sense of temporality is constructed by systems of power to direct lived experiences and meaning in the world.

Furthermore, Sharma argues that multiple temporalities occupy a single space at the same time.16

Sharma’s argument primarily relates to labor, or how temporality is experienced differently among different economic classes. Broader conceptions of temporality – past, present, and future

– highlight the unique experience that touring a heritage site encompasses. UNESCO’s World

Heritage aptly demonstrates how a single memory place is sutured to all three temporal modes to make claims about human civilization.

UNESCO’S Utopia

In addition to the intersecting roles of past, present, and future in memory sites, I aim to extend studies of time to spatial processes of temporal orientation. While time is considered the axis along which change is tracked, space, too, is an important indicator of rhetorical action.17

Rhetorical scholar Thomas Rickert argued that the space one exists in is a crucial part of the rhetorical environment that both acts upon and is acted upon by the human subject.18 He dissolves the subject/object distinction in rhetorical studies by claiming that it is impossible to

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separate agents from the spaces they reside in; that one’s environment is structured in a way that makes certain actions more likely than others. Rickert’s argument reveals the importance of space to change and development. Because rhetorical action is determined through environment, the physical space in which humans speak and act must be designed to optimize a desired trajectory.

Rickert’s claim is relevant to UNESCO’s utopian pursuits for two reasons. First, it explains why the takeover of national spaces to promote international aims is important – it renders their vision accessible to others. Second, it problematizes the arrangement of space by actors outside of the site. While Rickert aptly illustrates the connection between human and environment, he does not discuss the implications of putting the structuring of an environment in the hands of a person or organization that does not occupy the space. In Dresden’s case, the World Heritage

Committee cannot experience the interworkings of the space: the day-to-day interactions, the movement in, out, and through the site, and the systems and structures that imbue it with meaning. The space, to the faraway agent, remains somewhat abstracted and their visions for its change always come from other environmental motivations.

Studying the Dresden World Heritage Site as a utopian endeavor could elucidate this gap between agent and environment. Utopia is, after all, about what one’s environment is not. To pursue utopia, one needs sites that resist the dominant systems of the subpar environment they wish to replace. Looking elsewhere for utopia is an essential part of the concept’s history:

More’s character in Utopia escaped British society by sailing to a faraway island.19 This geographic distance is supposed to move the critic away from the constraints of her own environment, to a distant place untouched by the environment under critique. To UNESCO, the collection of disperse lands into a utopian network ensures the availability of space for

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cosmopolitan development. By discursively removing sites from the sovereign lands they occupy, UNESCO attempts to strip them of their national and local biases and set them apart for future-oriented projects.

The UN’s utopic vision manifests itself most convincingly in its World Heritage Sites. While the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other UN policies establish a utopic vision, it is up to programs like World Heritage to bring this vision into fruition. Political utopias are relevant only when they have the potential to be realized. In Mannheim’s utopian theory, utopia is always in a process of being realized throughout history. Ricoeur summarizes Mannheim’s claims, “Change does not occur at any moment but as the culmination of historical evolution.

Instead of a focus on the outburst of the kairos, the emphasis is on growth and becoming.”20

Here, time is understood as a positive linear progression. To UNESCO, eventual realization of utopia is considered inevitable, which means that the UN’s primary rhetorical task is to demonstrate how the organization’s principles work in concert with this forward progression.

World Heritage Sites are not utopias but works in progress that will eventually come to their full potential.

At first glance the sites may seem to defy utopic expectations, since their significance derives from their connection to natural or human history. This connection to the past is not new to utopian theory. Ricoeur identifies a nostalgic element in many utopias – a desire to return to the root of human existence, a kind of perfect natural state.21 This desire is utopic because it does not result in a desire to go back in time; rather, it seeks to use history to identify a perfect natural state for humankind and build a better future in which this state can be fully realized. UNESCO takes a similar approach to their World Heritage program. The remarkable architecture, natural

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parks, and historic cityscapes come together to tell a story about global history – and to inspire generations to come.22

Above all utopia is an ideal, but that ideal manifests in space, both literal and figurative.

Michel Foucault described the act of physical space-making in terms of heterotopias: existing places that reflect and contrast dominant societal ideals.23 UNESCO’s World Heritage Sites could be termed heterotopias, but this classification fails to attend to their transcendence of the physical spaces in which they reside. It is not the place on its own that makes a World Heritage

Site utopic; it is the tenuous connection to other, faraway places. Taken on their own, the connections among World Heritage Sites is flimsy. Each place is separated by geography and history. UNESCO’s task, then, is to find the common connections that weave together separate histories into a common narrative of human development. The singular connection between the pyramids at Giza, the Cathedral of Notre-Dame, Independence Hall, and many more sites is the cosmopolitan future they supposedly share.

Because it lifts geographical and spatial borders, utopia is well-suited for cosmopolitan endeavors. Unlike globalization, which refers to the increasing connectedness of humans through international trade and politics, cosmopolitanism is the search for a global human connection based on shared principles and values. Cosmopolitan ties between humans are not as easily identified as the more material effects of globalization. Instead, they must be constructed through ideology, rationality and historiography. Utopia helps fill in these less visible gaps between region and culture. Crafting a cosmopolitan utopia brings together humans who, in the present, are separated by linguistic, geographic, and economic barriers through a commitment to a future space where these barriers are lifted. In essence, the goal of cosmopolitanism is universal humanity.

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In addition to spatial borders, a successful utopia also transcends temporal borders. Utopia is a bridge among past, present, and future, and the imposition of physical space into utopias does not negate this temporal presence. Adopting World Heritage Sites is a particular challenge for the United Nation’s philosophy; places across the globe must be chosen for their historical significance, granted special protections in the present, and given a place in the progressive development of humankind. To understand how UNESCO achieves such a feat, I turn to a brief history of World Heritage Sites after World War II.

UNESCO and World Heritage: A Brief History

In 1959, a development project in Egypt sparked international cooperation and concern.

The Egyptian government planned to build a new dam that would protect crops from annual floods and droughts across the Nile River, thus improving the country’s agricultural production.

While necessary for the well-being of Egyptian citizens, the project threatened ancient monuments in Egypt and Sudan, including the Egyptian temple to Ramses II. After the Egyptian and Sudanese governments petitioned the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural

Organization (UNESCO) for assistance, the “Nubia Campaign” became the first official preservation campaign to be carried out by the United Nations. By framing the Nubian monuments as artifacts with indisputable universal value, UNESCO was able to garner international financial and political support for their project.

UNESCO was able to attract outstanding international support largely because the Aswan

Dam project was considered a threat to universal heritage. Building the dam was inevitable; historical analysis argues that it would have been impossible to provide Egypt with enough water during drought seasons if the dam’s construction had been halted.24 But for one of the first times

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in UNESCO’s history, the needs of a universal global citizenship were considered on the same level as the nation’s present-day citizens. UNESCO’s conception of universal citizenship was inherently threatened by the destruction of cultural property. Their argument was that these artifacts were representative of not only the local populations that surrounded them, but of a more inclusive global culture. The rising waters of the Nile called an international community to action particularly because they would destroy the (global) cultural history of citizens around the world. As a result, the monuments were removed from their original areas and relocated away from the Nile’s rising tides before the Aswan Dam was constructed. After the transplant, construction of the Aswan Dam began, uninhibited by the potential destruction of valuable heritage. Meanwhile, the transplanted Nubian monuments – from the Temples of Ramses II at

Abu Simbel to the Sanctuary of Isis at Philae – were named on UNESCO’s list of National

Heritage Sites. Grouped with thousands of other sites, the Nubian monuments symbolize and justify the global community’s shared history and cosmopolitan future.

After UNESCO’s intervention in Egypt and Sudan, labeling and preserving World

Heritage Sites – places of “outstanding universal value” – has become one of the organization’s defining achievements.25 World Heritage Sites exist primarily to protect outstanding historical sites from destruction. UNESCO’s goal is to preserve the world’s past so that it remains available for a better, cosmopolitan future. The organization’s central claim is that historical sites cannot be protected from modern destruction through national initiatives alone, but through a set of international standards that safeguard the historical sites from destruction in modern times.26

Destruction is defined broadly as any environmental or human activity that threatens the integrity of the heritage site. As such, economic developments that serve a sovereign nation’s citizens in the present can do irreparable harm to future. As evidenced by the Aswan Dam and the Nubia

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campaign, the tension that UNESCO seeks to address is ultimately not between progress and destruction, but between two kinds of progress: national-capitalist development and cosmopolitan, utopian gains.

UNESCO’s World Heritage program developed out of the successful Nubia Campaign, in which their efforts in Egypt and Sudan demonstrated that amassing international support for endangered monuments was possible. In 1971, members of UNESCO attended a conference dedicated to the protection of monuments, sites, and groups of buildings, which began with the assumption that the world’s heritage was inherently threatened. The preliminary report states, “In previous centuries age, neglect, vandalism, ignorance and natural catastrophes all took their toll; new measures are now necessary because in all countries today the very survival of both monuments and their natural surroundings is seriously jeopardized.”27 To combat this temporal unraveling of the world’s important heritage, UNESCO called for a standardized international system of protection. Through the proposed system UNESCO would be able to recognize endangered sites and access preexisting mechanisms for their preservation.

This endangerment was the result of what UNESCO considered to be unsustainable practices of everyday life that humans impose upon physical space. For example, the report named industrialization as one of the primary causes of cultural destruction: “The industrial revolution, in fact, in upsetting the traditional order, uproots men from the natural environment in which everything contributed to the shaping of customs, beliefs, and social equilibrium. Men are now transplanted in vast numbers to towns whose unplanned development produces immense urban sprawls incapable of satisfying the requirements of life on a suitably human scale.”28 Fear of industrialization poses a unique problem for UNESCO. Increased urbanization and globalization brings about a sense of loss – populations stand to lose their cultural uniqueness as

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humans crowd into cities and suburbs in search of work and a better life. Attention to detail and beauty takes a backseat to increased production. In the wake of industrialization, UNESCO’s report recalled a cultural nostalgia, a desire for humans to return to the species’ cultural roots. In its report UNESCO asserted that there is a traditional order to the world that, if accessed, would result in peace and prosperity.

With this desire to return, though, is a celebration of human development – artistic or architectural achievements, scientific advancements, and philosophical progressions – that makes moving forward an essential piece of UNESCO’s mission. Humanity cannot simply return to the way things were in the past; rather, UNESCO’s aim is to seek out the roots of a shared humanity and recalibrate our path toward a development that reflects such cultural roots. In addition to preservation, the UNESCO report states that, “All necessary measures should be taken to preserve and breathe new life into the national heritage.”29 UNESCO’s emphasis on the past, then, is based on a desire to bring elements of the past into the future.

UNESCO was not interested in preserving every aspect of the past, only those that possess “universal value.” In the preliminary report UNESCO made it clear that its preservation funds would be reserved for monuments and sites that represent world, not national, heritage.30

The definition of “universal value” is vague and open-ended. UNESCO’s final report splits heritage sites into “natural areas”, which encompass significant or unique plants, animals, or land formations, and “cultural sites,” which “reflect a significant event or stage in the development of world civilization.”31

A year later, representatives from 193 states voted UNESCO’s plans into action at the

Convention Concerning the Protection of the World’s Cultural and Natural Heritage. At the convention UNESCO’s representatives determined ten criteria for determining what sites

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embodied universal value worthy of UNESCO’s monetary and rhetorical support: sites receive funding from UNESCO as well as promotion and A natural site could be included on the world heritage list if it displayed “exceptional beauty,” demonstrated important ecological processes or natural history, or contained crucial plants, animals, or natural formations in need of conservation.32 A cultural site should exemplify human values, art, architecture, scientific achievements, or cultural traditions.33 The definitions were left open-ended, as the most important component of a world heritage site would be the willingness of its host country to open the space to international (symbolic) ownership.

UNESCO’s World Heritage program was regarded as a response to changes to national sovereignty in an increasingly cosmopolitan world. In the following section, I consider how

UNESCO protects such borders from national interference like industrial development. I focus this portion of my analysis on Germany’s Dresden Elbe Valley, the only cultural site to be delisted from the World Heritage program. Through both studies I aim to recognize the interplay between physical spaces and their temporal, utopic connections.

Dresden Elbe Valley: A Space Marked for Cosmopolitan Progress

UNESCO’s primary World Heritage goal is to protect historic places from modern interference, regardless of present national interests. Occasionally, the needs of the sovereign nations that own world heritage sites coincide with the desires of UNESCO’s World Heritage program. Dresden Elbe Valley, the only delisted European site, exemplifies this tension between national and cosmopolitan citizenship. Added to the World Heritage list in 2004, Dresden Elbe

Valley lasted only five years before it was delisted in 2009. The reason for its expulsion from

UNESCO’s network of cosmopolitan wonders was the construction of a bridge that cut across the valley, mitigating traffic congestion in and out of the city. The bridge did not deplete the site

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of all of its natural heritage, nor did it halt the stream of tourism to the city of Dresden. To representatives at UNESCO, though, the Waldschlösschen Bridge (Waldschlößchenbrücke) inherently altered the historical integrity of the landscape, making it incompatible with their vision for the place. In the following section I analyze the discourse between UNESCO representatives and German proponents of the bridge. This discourse consists of UNESCO’s official documentation of Dresden’s nomination and subsequent reporting on the bridge project, as well as Dresden’s official brochure documenting the project and media coverage of the controversy. Through this analysis I seek to understand how the presence of the bridge, in

UNESCO’s view, severed Dresden Elbe Valley’s ties to other cosmopolitan places.

The city of Dresden was culturally significant long before UNESCO stamped it with their

World Heritage seal of approval. Founded in 1206, the city tells a story of German development through art, architecture, and religion. As Dresden grew in population, it became known for its bridges across the Elbe, as well as many architectural feats. For example, Frauenkirche (The

Church of our Lady), commissioned by Friedrich August II (St. Augustus), became a cultural landmark at the center of the city until it was destroyed by bombs in 1945.34 Dresden’s appeal extended far past the city center to the fields that housed a tradition of winemaking and the meadows and river the city developed around.

Dresden Elbe Valley is unique not only in its cultural history, but in its survival and reconstruction following World War II. Large portions of the city of Dresden were destroyed by allied forces in the bombing on 1945 and had to be rebuilt after the war. Dresden’s reconstruction process, which took place from 1945 to the early 1990s, was a constant negotiation between modern urban development and cultural preservation. Historian John Soane wrote that arguments over the reconstruction of Dresden were a struggle for the souls of German

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citizens.35 After the war Dresden existed in Soviet-occupied East Germany. Early models for reconstruction emphasized opportunities to mold the city into a new socialist utopia; the plans centered on creating a modern, utilitarian cityscape with plenty of room for public demonstrations.36 Today, these designs manifest in communist-style residential buildings around the edge of the city: large concrete apartment buildings meant to house large numbers of people.

Because Dresden was meant to be a communist city, historical reconstruction projects took second place to practical urban design. For example, Dresden’s most notable original landmark,

Frauenkirche, was left in rubble for the totality of Soviet Occupation. Frauenkirche may have one day been rebuilt by the Soviet regime, but only if its restoration could prove useful to new, socialist causes. Thus, in the years following World War II the Dresden restoration project was a constant give and take between preserving the area’s cultural roots and paving the way for modern, communist use. After German reunification in the early nineties, cultural integrity again began to take precedence in the city. The city started several reconstruction projects, including the famous Frauenkirche.

To UNESCO, Dresden’s destruction in World War II and partial reconstruction as a socialist utopia was an unfortunate blot on the city’s otherwise democratic cosmopolitan development. Consequently, when city officials nominated Dresden’s Baroque Ensemble, a collection of reconstructed historic buildings, in 1990, it was rejected by the World Heritage

Committee because the buildings were no longer authentic.37 Although Dresden’s cityscape had undergone changes throughout the year, the surrounding river and valley remained virtually unchanged. Thus, in 2004 the World Heritage Committee accepted a new nomination for

Dresden Elbe Valley, an area that “includes a portion of the old city of Dresden with an additional 18 km of the Elbe Valley upstream of the city.”38 The 2004 nomination report for

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Dresden Elbe Valley emphasized the city’s cosmopolitan historical roots while downplaying the effects of World War II and Soviet control on the city’s appearance. The value of Dresden Elbe

Valley was in its representation of 18th and 19th century European urban development. For example, the report described the largely untouched forests, vineyards and meadows surrounding the city, as well as the Renaissance and baroque buildings that had survived into the twentieth century.39 The city was described as not only preserving the past but carrying it into modern times, as evidenced by the tradition of wine-making within the city limits. This carrying forth of traditions helped capture UNESCO’s attention and establish Dresden Elbe Valley as a site worthy of protection.

This protection took an international turn in 2004, when UNESCO and the Free State of

Saxony agreed to the terms of the World Heritage Program. From this point forward, the area of

Dresden from the Elbe River to Innere Aldstadt (inner Old Town) would be protected by

UNESCO.40 With this protection came a set of responsibilities. Any changes to the area had to match UNESCO’s interpretation of the site: Environmental protection and historic restoration were permissible, modern architecture was not. While Dresden Elbe Valley’s World Heritage seal expanded the area’s opportunities for growth, it simultaneously limited the city’s trajectory of growth by constraining the ways in which Dresden could develop.

UNESCO described Dresden Elbe Valley as a “continuing cultural landscape;” the area was said to contain layers from various periods of history.41 UNESCO’s report traces the site’s development in medieval times to the construction of its stylized baroque buildings in the 18th and early 20th centuries. The development of Dresden Elbe Valley was remarkable, UNESCO concluded, because it resulted in harmony between city and landscape.42 Under the criteria section UNESCO wrote, “Landscape and architecture in the Elbe Valley have developed in an

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unusually close and harmonious connection. Thus, a cultural site of high aesthetic and artistic value has been created.”43 Dresden Elbe Valley met UNESCO’s criteria for a World Heritage

Site because it proved an example of continuing aesthetic and sustainable development. Unlike the Nubian monuments, which represented one distinct time in history, Dresden Elbe Valley showcased the area’s historical progression. The site was, in effect, a model of UNESCO’s goals for development. Throughout history the city’s inhabitants managed to balance modernization with respect for the site’s environmental and cultural integrity. Dresden Elbe Valley told a story of continued development that aligned with UNESCO’s vision for utopian progress.

Dresden Elbe Valley packed an extensive history into one World Heritage Site; however, the site’s more recent history was clearly not a part of the heritage nomination. UNESCO’s 150- page report directly mentions the bombings of 1945 once, in the context of reconstruction.

Referencing the city’s distinct cultural buildings, the report stated, “All buildings and arrangements were heavily damaged during the bombing raids in 1945. However, it was possible to rebuild and restore them during the following decades.”44 UNESCO did not deny the widespread destruction in 1945, but the events are considered insignificant in the context of cosmopolitan utopia. Furthermore, the 1945 bombing was not the only “destruction” the site had undergone. The report explained, “After the was Altstadt [Old Town] was rebuilt partially in modern style, destroying, therefore, the historic structure of the city.”45 Dresden’s nomination as a “continuing cultural landscape” did emphasize multiple histories, but only histories that exemplified cosmopolitan development were recalled in the report. Histories of war and destruction were therefore pushed out of the memory space. This segmentation was possible for

UNESCO because Dresden was reconstituted as a utopic space; the area’s primary purpose was

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to provide a glimpse of what a cosmopolitan future would bring, not to remember the past.

Memories of World War II could be relegated to other, non-world heritage sites.

UNESCO’s utopic aim for the site also excluded the city’s former Soviet occupation. The initial report on Dresden lists “complete or partial demolition of large blocks of flats in

Johannstadt” under its main development goals for the city.46 This Soviet-era housing project was considered incompatible with the city’s general aesthetic. The city’s utilitarian housing was aesthetically unpleasing; more importantly, it did not tell the story of democratic cosmopolitanism that Dresden Elbe Valley supposedly represented. While Dresden’s time as an

East German site was indisputable, this time was an unfortunate blot on the history of an otherwise flourishing cosmopolitan city. Thus, Dresden’s acceptance into UNESCO’s World

Heritage List included plans to eventually eradicate manifestations of communism around the area.

The rehabilitation of Dresden Elbe Valley represented the triumph of democratic capitalism over other forms of government. The roots of democratic culture were said to have existed in the city all along, though they had previously been repressed by Soviet reconstruction projects. UNESCO framed these projects as artificial; they were at odds with the rich cultural practices and environmental structures that defined Dresden. For example, UNESCO left little room for doubt about the effect the modern building style of East Germany had on the historic town center: “After the war the Altstadt [old town] was rebuilt partially in modern style, destroying, thereby, the historic structure of the city.”47 Through discourse, UNESCO presented their aims for Dresden as a reflection of the area’s true nature. Their development plans, then, were a return to what the city had already been, before it was mistaken for a socialist space.

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In Dresden’s nomination report, UNESCO sought to recognize the spaces of Dresden that had retained their cultural integrity through the Soviet reign. This resulted in a prioritization of

Dresden’s environmental heritage over its architectural memories. The meadows, vineyards, forests, and landscape surrounding the River Elbe had for the most part remained untouched by the Dresden bombing and looked the same as they had for years. Dresden Elbe Valley’s environmental landscape was an outstanding cultural heritage; moreover, it set an example of preservation that all cosmopolitan memory sites should strive to follow. UNESCO stated, “The preservation of the vistas to and from the city and the fact that the Elbe river meadows were kept free and not built upon were due to farsighted rules for town planning. Thanks to this Dresden has a unique connection between surrounding landscape and architecture.”48 Dresden’s city did not simply develop, it developed with a plan. Early on in Dresden’s history, city planners worked under constraints to expand and modernize while keeping much of the surrounding environment intact. As a result, the city mirrored what UNESCO itself hoped to do all over the world: to move forward with a plan to protect history and culture.

Submitting Dresden to World Heritage regulations, then, would simply be a continuation of what the city had done for years: develop sustainably while leaving its cultural integrity intact.

The aim for all of UNESCO’s World Heritage Sites was not only historical preservation; goals for further development were always outlined in any site’s nomination. Dresden’s report was no different. In their nomination report Dresden outlined an ongoing set of plans to enhance the cultural and historic roots of the newly acquired site. The river, forests, and vineyards would need to be protected over the modern needs of the city. Furthermore, the aesthetic appeal of the site would have to take precedence in all development projects. New residential areas, for example, should be built with as much greenery as possible.49 Thus, UNESCO’s plans were

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about protecting both the past and the future: the World Heritage Committee argued that Dresden would continue to grow and develop, but the guidelines outlined in its World Heritage status would make sure it did so in a way that was compatible with its cultural ideals.

The addition of Dresden Elbe Valley to UNESCO’s World Heritage list in 2004 transformed the space from a German city to a cosmopolitan center. Ownership of the site was complex: though the city would remain under German sovereignty, development of the valley was bound by world heritage guidelines. Dresden’s dual sovereignty (national and international) did leave room for growth and change; however, all additions, deletions, or alterations to the landscape had to be pre-approved by UNESCO officers. Dresden’s nomination document stated,

“The legally binding land utilisation plan (FNP) of the capital of Saxony … takes into account in its planning intentions the uniqueness of the Elbe area in its symbiosis of landscape and built-up area.”50 As determined in 2004, any significant changes to Dresden Elbe Valley had to match the historic integrity of the area. The nomination thus closed off the space to various types of change. Other areas of Germany could focus on economic or industrial development, while

Dresden would retain its cultural integrity. If the city adhered to the World Heritage Committee’s regulations, Dresden would be effectively frozen in time. Even though the space was marked for the future, it was separated from other German spaces by the terms of its World Heritage status, which mandated that its development did not mirror the industrial or economic changes of other cities. The world heritage borders bound Dresden Elbe Valley to the past, and to a future marked by cultural vestiges of democracy.

The authority to parse out what time periods Dresden would represent was bestowed upon UNESCO on the assumption that the organization was able to distinguish between world and sovereign heritage. UNESCO’s nomination documents made it clear that aesthetics and

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historical integrity were the most important factors in Dresden’s upkeep; thus, all development programs should not only focus on the needs of Dresden’s inhabitants, but should also fulfill the needs of an international audience who viewed the site as a piece of their cultural heritage. Thus, the nomination document included sections relating to all anticipated major projects in the area.

Some plans meant to emphasize the city’s history through new additions. For example, the plan titled “Dresden-Friedrichstadt No. 4, commercial area Bremer Straße/Hamburger Straße” outlined the decision to redesign the road areas of Hamburger and Bremer Straße to perform as a city entrance to Dresden. The plan explained, “The concept enables an urban-architectural upgrading of the area while the majority of existing firms remain and the green areas north of

Bremer Straße will be preserved.”51 The plans for the city entrance demonstrated how new construction could actually enhance, not detract from, the city’s historical structure by adhering to the design norms of the original city. Furthermore, the construction steered clear of the green areas of the valley, safeguarding the natural landscape that had been around for centuries.

By reconstituting Dresden as a World Heritage Site, UNESCO determined the criteria for what was allowed inside and outside of Dresden’s cultural borders. The World Heritage

Committee defined Dresden Elbe Valley by the area it encompassed, the time period it would represent, and the extent of international control over the bordered space. Further projects were not prohibited; in fact, they were an essential component of the site’s international appeal.

However, the forms such projects could take were ordered by the area’s utopian aims. Like all of its World Heritage Sites, UNESCO’s plans for Dresden were to usher the space into a utopian network, to continue to accentuate the city’s democratic roots for uptake in the future. This pursuit meant that the World Heritage Committee would not only encourage avenues of development, but would also safeguard against potential threats to the area.

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Waldschlößchenbrücke: A Democratic Threat to Utopia

UNESOCO’s other plans for Dresden focused less on adding cultural elements and more on halting the advancement of non-culturally oriented projects. Waldschlößchenbrücke, the bridge that would eventually cause Dresden’s expulsion from the world heritage program, was already a matter of concern in 2004. The report stated that options for up to five new bridges were being discussed, but that only one decision had been reached: the area for

Waldschlößchenbrücke had already been selected.52 Dresden already had a legal commitment to construct a bridge in Waldschlösschen, an area at the center of the nominated site.53 The proposed bridge was a matter of concern because it would cut across the scenic meadows off of the Elbe River; however, not much could be done at the time to undo Germany’s commitment to the project. The best UNESCO could do was influence the city council to choose a style that matched the site’s eight historic bridges. In spite of UNESCO’s uncertainty about the new bridge, representatives voted Dresden onto the World Heritage list at the thirteeth annual convention. From the time of its nomination, Waldschlößchenbrücke persisted as a potential threat that could alienate the city from its international supporters.

Unlike Dresden’s partial redesign as a socialist space, Waldschlößchenbrücke was a debate between two separate democratic visions for the landscape. The city had halted construction on the bridge prior to its World Heritage designation in 2004; however, a citywide poll in 2005 revealed that 67.9% of residents supported construction of the bridge.54 German city planners reported, “Because of the binding effect of the referendum, construction must begin from a legal perspective.”55 In order to accurately represent democratic principles of “rule by the people,” city planners decided to resume planning in April 2005, with the aim to begin

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construction in 2006. The city’s reuptake of plans for the bridge alarmed representatives of

UNESCO, who felt they should have been part of the decision to build. As a result, all plans for construction were halted until an agreement could be reached between UNESCO and Dresden’s city council.

Both sides framed their arguments about Waldschlößchenbrücke in terms of democratic principles. To UNESCO, cosmopolitan democracy should be supported by the city’s natural and architectural appearance. The bridge project seemed to disregard Dresden’s status as a model to the world because it favored transportation and industrial development over preservation of the area’s natural heritage. UNESCO described the location of the bridge as “a crucial point for the view access, located within the core zone of the World Heritage cultural landscape.”56

Furthermore, the report argued that the bridge would bring more pollution to the city, again complicating its role as a model for democratic, sustainable development. On January 20, 2006 the Mayor of Dresden, the Permanent Delegation of Germany to UNESCO, the German Foreign

Office, and the German National Commission met UNESCO representatives at the World

Heritage Center to discuss Dresden’s future. At the meeting it was decided that Dresden’s city council would perform “a visual impact study of the bridge proposal” before making a final decision.57

The City Council of Dresden framed the Waldschlößchenbrücke project as a piece of

Dresden’s history that would finally be realized. In a brochure sent to the World Heritage Center in April 2006, the City Council detailed deliberations over a bridge project dating as far back as

1900.58 This early version of the bridge, the report states, was not built due to economic reasons.

A 1930s proposal for the bridge was subsequently abandoned due to the outbreak of World War

II. By outlining earlier proposals in the area, the City Council attempted to demonstrate that the

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bridge was as much a part of history as Frauenkirche, the vineyards, or surrounding landscape.

According to the brochure, “The planning history of the Waldschlößchenbrücke bridge, going back more than one hundred years, is the story of a structure deemed necessary on all sides, which exists on paper and has yet not been completed for reasons of overriding importance.”59

Support for Waldschlößchenbrücke was grounded in historical legitimacy, mirroring UNESCO’s own criteria for selecting world heritage sites. In a sense the bridge did already exist in the city’s plans for development since beginning of the 20th century. Far from an obstruction, the bridge was intrinsically Dresden.

The problem for Waldschlößchenbrücke’s advocates was that UNESCO was not interested in Dresden’s full history – only the parts of the narrative that bolstered its World

Heritage identity. UNESCO’s argument also depended on the history of the space, although this argument centered on the rootedness of the environmental landscape and historical lack of a bridge on Waldschlößchen grounds. The World Heritage Committee and its supporters contrasted Dresden’s triumph in the face of fascism and communism with what would now be considered an aesthetic and cultural defeat. Gunter Blobel, a German-born Nobel Prize-winning scientist who donated a significant portion of his prize money to Dresden’s historical preservation, complained, “Dresden was bombed, but the vineyards and meadows and the valleys were not destroyed -- until now.”60 To World Heritage supporters, the needs of motorists and city residents infringed upon years of cosmopolitan potential. If carried out, the bridge project would alter the historical trajectory of the space, rendering it an inadequate place in which to model a better future. In other words, putting the needs of the present ahead of the needs of a cosmopolitan public robbed the space of its potential for uptake in a cosmopolitan utopia.

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The City Council of Dresden countered that Waldschlößchenbrücke was absolutely essential to the city’s continued development. The bridge would help mitigate traffic in the city and reduce the number of vehicles on the city’s older bridges, persevering them for the admiration of tourists for years to come. According to the City Council brochure,

Waldschlößchenbrücke was a way to address the same preservation concerns that the World

Heritage Committee sought to protect in Dresden. Furthermore, the City Council rejected the

World Heritage Committee’s claim that the bridge prioritized commercial interest over natural beauty. They argued, “The need to build a bridge comes from the context of the city as a whole and expresses the overwhelming will of the people.”61 Building Waldschlößchenbrücke was democracy at work – a point that was particularly important given the area’s history of fascist and socialist rule.

The City Council’s explanatory brochure challenged the World Heritage Committee’s assertion that a discrepancy between the bridge and UNESCO’s ideals existed at all. Instead, the brochure stated that Waldschlößchenbrücke was actually an embodiment of everything the

World Heritage Site stood for. Highlighting criterion v, the City Council reminded the World

Heritage Committee that Dresden’s acceptance was based on its status as a “continuing heritage site,” meaning it modeled a sustainable process of city planning that respected the interplay between natural and built features of the area. According to City Council, “The Dresden Elbe

Valley is an outstanding example of the form of settlement of a European residence developed through the centuries, which, with suburbs and surrounding villages, including wine-growing hills and fields, grows together into a big city.”62 Here the city’s World Heritage status was framed as an action. If city growth were stunted, Dresden would fail to live up to its exemplary

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standards. The brochure asserted, “The bridge – whether real or on paper – has always been a part of city development, and that is precisely what the World Heritage status is all about.”63

UNESCO and Dresden’s city council relied on the same arguments to make their separate cases for and against the Bridge project. Both claimed to be working to embody the values of democracy, cultural development and cosmopolitan citizenship. How, then, did the

Waldschlößchenbrücke project divide the two groups to the extent that UNESCO threatened to remove Dresden from the World Heritage list at the moment construction began?64 To answer such questions, it is important to understand what the bridge represented for each side. UNESCO reported that Waldschlößchenbrücke did not fit in with the design of Dresden’s other historic buildings, that it obscured historic views of the city, and that it would cut across the World

Heritage landscape, “splitting it irreversibly into two halves.”65 To UNESCO, the argument was all about space – how regional space was framed and utilized for cosmopolitan goals and how the temporal understanding of the space was rooted in the past. Waldschlößchenbrücke represented the misappropriation of cosmopolitan space for local needs; in their report UNESCO was clear that the city council did not give them a role in the decision-making process, choosing to forgo the interests of their international community. To put the very present desires ahead of the areas potential to serve as a cosmopolitan model well into the future was to UNESCO a violation of the utopic principles the organization stood for.

To Dresden’s city council and a majority of its residents, Waldschlößchenbrücke symbolized an opportunity to close the gap between seemingly conflicting needs, to harmonize past and present; commercial development and cultural preservation. The brochure explained,

“In Dresden, the word »bridge« seems to stand for the fusion of different interests, for the interrelation of old and new – of the past and the future, for finding new forms of artistic

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expression, opening up new horizons.”66 Dresden was described an ongoing process of blending past, present, and future. The changes to the cityscape and static preservation of the surrounding landscape were part of what made Dresden Elbe Valley what it was. The report pointed out that

Dresden’s architectural buildings alone had been denied world heritage status. It was only after officials combined Dresden’s architecture with its picturesque natural features that it was accepted as a space worthy of international admiration.67

Supporters of Waldschlößchenbrücke described it as not only a bridge, but as part of

Dresden’s continuing influence on European civic culture. Amid pictures of famous bridges around the world, Dresden’s brochure described how a bridge may become an intractable feature of renowned landscapes. The idea of Waldschlößchenbrücke as a place of cultural significance was not far-fetched for Dresden, which was known for its eight other bridges across the Elbe.

Additionally, each earlier bridge project had been framed by political disputes regarding its construction. The report continued, “The city’s bridges were and are places which civil society can relate to. The unique development of city planning in Dresden would be unimaginable without the disputes about the city bridges.”68 There was room in Dresden’s history for political arguments, at least to Dresden’s residents.

To both parties, Waldschlößchenbrücke represented the strife between local leadership and international intervention. Although UNESCO had already delisted one World Heritage Site, the Arabian oryx sanctuary, it had been at the Oman government’s request. For the first time, the dangers to Dresden stemmed directly from its local, democratic government, rather than outside commercial forces. Mechtild Roessler, chief of the European and North American unit of

UNESCO's World Heritage Center, reported that Dresden city officials had failed to share their plans for Waldschlößchen with UNESCO, who instead found out about the bridge project from

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the press.69 Supporters of the bridge, however, were quick to remind UNESCO of the city’s local sovereignty. Attorney Nikolaus Koehler-Totzki told the Los Angeles Times: "We are not living in a dictatorship. We are a democracy, and I want to decide for myself how I go from A to B. It may be by train, it may be by bicycle, it may be by car, but I want to have the freedom to decide."70 Koehler-Totzki reiterated a point that is often obscured by UNESCO: that the organization has limited power to influence what happens to the land they seek to protect.

UNESCO’s claim on the properties encompassed by their world heritage sites is tenuous.

Their ability to border and preserve spaces around the world depends on the willingness of local citizens and leaders to listen to and account for their goals for the area. The best that UNESCO could do by Dresden, along with its other sites, was to attract international attention to the site and to persuade that audience to accept their vision for the area. Dresden was not yet a cosmopolitan utopia, but its appeal to international visitors meant that it had potential to one day be one. However, the citizens and officials had derailed this potential with the threat of

Waldschlößchenbrücke. In city officials’ failure to come to a compromise with UNESCO,

Dresden lost its cosmopolitan ties. It no longer spoke to an international audience (with

UNESCO as the mediator), but to its local residents who voted the project into existence.

UNESCO moved Dresden to its List of World Heritage in Danger on August 23, 2006.

In the 30th session of the committee, UNESCO noted that “the construction of the

"Waldschlösschen bridge" would irreversibly damage the values and integrity of the property.”71

The committee requested that “ the State Party and the City authorities to urgently halt this construction project and to take up discussions with all stakeholders to find alternative solutions so as to ensure the safeguarding of the outstanding universal value of the property.”72 Dresden was by far not the only world heritage site to be moved to the endangered list; however, the

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German public’s reaction to the rhetorical punishment defied UNESCO’s expectations for its partners. Normally, being placed on the List of World Heritage in Danger was enough of an embarrassment to mobilize the site’s official’s to change. Dresden’s city officials did not succumb to international shame, but insisted that the plans for Waldschlößchenbrücke would benefit residents and tourists alike. In Waldschlößchenbrücke UNESCO met the limitations of its quest for international memory space.

UNESCO warned Dresden city officials that the valley would be delisted if construction continued and on July 20, 2009, UNESCO fulfilled their promise, making Dresden second site to lose its world heritage status. Environmentalists and world heritage supporters lamented the loss of a pristine site that had survived the bombings of World War II, but despair for Dresden’s lost past was not universal. On August 24, 2013, almost exactly four years since Dresden was declared endangered, hundreds of people gathered on the newly constructed

Waldschlößchenbrücke to celebrate its opening ceremony. News outlets reported that Dresden’s citizens seemed pleased by the project. This was perhaps unsurprising, as a majority of residents had voted in favor of the new bridge. Four years after losing its world heritage status, finishing construction on the bridge that had been its downfall was overwhelming positive. The BBC reported, “The premier of Saxony, Stanislaw Tillich, and Dresden Mayor Helma Orosz officially cut the ribbon. Unsurprisingly, no Unesco officials were present.”73

Although Dresden Elbe Valley had lost its world heritage status, it retained its significance to the people of Dresden. Dresden’s Waldschlößchenbrücke was ultimately a dispute over sovereignty. Through a constant negotiation of borders and progress, the bridge dispute pressed the question of whose vision the city would call forth into being. As a continuing city, Dresden was in a constant state of becoming. Members of the World Heritage Committee

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recognized its opportunity to progress as a cosmopolitan utopia, an homage to democratic culture of the past and future. When Dresden’s residents usurped UNESCO’s authority to assert their own claims on the site, they disrupted the land’s tenuous connection to UNESCO’s network of potential cosmopolitan utopias. Going forward, Dresden would serve its inhabitants first, and an international community second.

Conclusion

Realizing utopias depends on a bordering of space, temporality, and sovereignty. Utopian places stand in tension with the surrounding area and serve as a foil to suggest a new way of being. In UNESCO’s case, establishing World Heritage Sites within national boundaries directed human’s visions to an alternative, global citizenship where memory and culture are shared across sovereign borders. The tension between local and cosmopolitan utopian boundaries were precisely what defined Dresden’s potential for the future, but the dominant values of the surrounding space always threatened to encroach upon the memory site. UNESCO’s identification of cosmopolitan places is never finished. It is an ongoing process, a constant state of negotiation between competing histories and values.

Defining Dresden as a World Heritage Site required a reordering of the existing space. In their plans for the site, the World Heritage Committee had to determine what memories deserved to be recognized in the future, and which should be left behind. The committee emphasized the place’s connection to democratic culture and values, while memories of occupation and socialism were pushed outside of the site’s boundaries. Through a selective choosing of the area’s history, the World Heritage Committee repositioned Dresden as a site for utopian progress.

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As an ongoing project, the World Heritage Committee could not simply set its goals for the site in motion and let it be. Dresden’s world heritage status demanded a constant negotiation between national and cosmopolitan sovereignty within the space. German lawmakers and representatives from the World Heritage Committee had to work together to ensure the alignment of their visions for the area. World Heritage principles advocate respect for national sovereignty; however, the committee had a specific vision for the city that they sought to enforce. For the World Heritage Committee, building a new bridge across the protected landscape was not only a violation of the spatial integrity; it was a challenge to UNESCO’s vision and the World Heritage Committee’s authority to enforce it.

UNESCO lost its world heritage site when the strict boundaries that would lead the site into utopian meaning were disregarded by German city officials. Like any acquisition of land, realizing utopias in the material world is an inherently political activity, dependent upon changes in leadership and values. Because utopias are primarily discursive and imagined, the spaces they come to inhabit can never fully attain the ideals they represent. Holding on to the utopian imagination, then, requires a constant reinforcement of the area’s history and path foreword.

When this vision is challenged, the place loses its utopian significance. The memory site is reintegrated into present national life, and the utopia is subsumed by the present.

1 Alan Taylor. “Remembering Dresden: 70 Years After the Firebombing” The Atlantic, 2015. https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2015/02/remembering-dresden-70-years-after-the- firebombing/385445/ 2 John Soane. “Dresden: Its Destruction and Rebuilding, 1945 – 85” in Anthony Clayton and Alan Russell. Dresden: A City Reborn. (Oxford: Oxford International Publishers, Ltd. 1999), 72 -73. 3 Soane 73. 4 Of UNESCO’s 1,052 world heritage sites, only two have been delisted. The first, the Arabian Oryx Sanctuary in Oman, was delisted in 2007. United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization. “Oman’s Arabian Oryx Sanctuary: First Site Ever to be Deleted from UNESCO’s World Heritage List.” http://whc.unesco.org/en/news/362/.

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5 UNESCO World Heritage Committee. “Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage” Twenty-Eighth Session. June 28 – July 7, 2004.; United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization. “Dresden Elbe Valley: Cultural Site: Nomination for Inclusion on the World Heritage List.” Nomination File 1156 (2004). Retrieved from UNESCO World Heritage Centre, “UNESCO World Heritage Centre - Decision - 30 COM 7B.77,” UNESCO World Heritage Centre, accessed March 1, 2017, http://whc.unesco.org/en/decisions/1163.; “Dresden Elbe Valley: World Heritage Scanned Nomination.” The United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization. < http://whc.unesco.org/uploads/nominations/1156.pdf>.; UNESCO World Heritage Committee. “Dresden Elbe Valley: Cultural Site” Nomination for Inclusion on the World Heritage List. < http://whc.unesco.org/uploads/nominations/1156.pdf>.; Machat, Christoph. “The World Heritage List – German Conflicts related to Buffer Zones and nomination areas of wide extention: Cologne Cathedral and Dresden Elbe Valley” Hiroshima Conference (2006).; City of Dresden, World Mayor. “Waldschlößchenbrücke Bridge and World Heritage Status.” Brochure – Urban Development Department (2006).; United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization. “Convention Concerning the Protection of World Cultural and Natural Heritage.” World Heritage Committee, Thirtieth Session. 8-16 July 2006, 197-198 http://whc.unesco.org/archive/2006/whc06-30com-7bE.pdf; Chu, Henry. Dresden bridge has an unusually high price. Los Angeles Times. October 13, 2009.; “Dresden ‘Eyesore’ Elbe Bridge Opens after Unesco Row,” BBC News, August 24, 2013, sec. Europe, http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-23825738. 6 Francesco Francioni: A Dynamic Evolution of Concept and Scope: From Cultural Property to Cultural Heritage in “Standard-Setting in UNESCO: Normative Action in Education, Science, and Culture (2007) vol 1 p. 225. 7 United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization. “Introducing UNESCO” http://en.unesco.org/about-us/introducing-unesco. 8 United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization “UNESCO Constitution,” accessed March 1, 2017, http://portal.unesco.org/en/ev.php- URL_ID=15244&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html. 9 Elizabeth Betsy Keough. “Heritage in Peril: A Critique of UNESCO’s World Heritage Program” Washington University Global Studies Law Review 10.3 (2011), 600. 10 David Held, Cosmopolitanism: Ideals and Realities, 1 edition (Cambridge ; Malden, MA: Polity, 2010). 11 Seyla Benhabib, The Claims of Culture: Equality and Diversity in the Global Era, First Edition (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 2002). 12 Alessandra Beasley Von Burg. “Caught Between History and Imagination: Vico's Ingenium for a Rhetorical Renovation of Citizenship” Philosophy and Rhetoric 43.1 (2010) 30. 13 Greg Dickinson, Carole Blair, and Brian L. Ott. Places of Public Memory: The Rhetoric of Museums and Memorials. (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2010), 23-24. 14 Dickinson et. Al 6. 15 Sarah Sharma, In the Meantime: Temporality and Cultural Politics (Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2014). 16 Sharma 22.

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17 Doreen Massey. For Space. (Sage Publications Ltd, 2005), 51. 18 Thomas Rickert. Ambient Rhetoric: The Attunements of Rhetorical Being. (The University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013), 76. 19 Thomas More. Utopia. 2015. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform. 20 Paul Ricoeur. Lectures on Ideology and Utopia. Trans. George H. Taylor. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 278. 21 Ricoeur 306. 22 UNESCO World Heritage Centre, “World Heritage,” UNESCO World Heritage Centre, accessed March 1, 2017, http://whc.unesco.org/en/about/. 23 Michel Foucault. “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias” Architecture/Mouvement/Continuite, 1984, 3. 24 Fekri A. Hassan “The Aswan High Dam and the International Rescue Nubia Campaign” African Archeological Review 24.73 (2007) 75. 25 United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization. “The Criteria for Selection. The World Heritage List. Accessed August 24, 2017. http://whc.unesco.org/en/criteria/. 26 United Nations Educational and Scientific and Cultural Organization. “International Agreement for the Protection of Monuments, Groups of Buildings, and Sites” (SHC/MD/17 Paris, June 30, 1971, UNESCO Archives, 3. < http://whc.unesco.org/archive/1971/shc-md- 17e.pdf> 27 United Nations Educational and Scientific and Cultural Organization. “International Agreement for the Protection of Monuments, Groups of Buildings, and Sites” (SHC/MD/17 Paris, June 30, 1971, UNESCO Archives, 5. < http://whc.unesco.org/archive/1971/shc-md- 17e.pdf> 28 Ibid., 6. 29 Ibid., 6. 30 Ibid., 6. 31 United Nations Educational and Scientific and Cultural Organization. “Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage” General Conference. Adopted 16 November 1972, 1. UNESCO Archives, accessed August 24, 2017. < http://whc.unesco.org/archive/convention-en.pdf> 32 Ibid. 52. 33 Ibid. 52. 34 Anthony Clayton. “Dresden, 1206 – 1918.” In Anthony Clayton and Alan Russell. Dresden: A City Reborn. (Oxford International Publishers Ltd. 1999), 16. 35 John Soane. “Dresden: Its Destruction and Rebuilding, 1945 – 85” in Clayton & Russell, Dresden: A City Reborn. (New York: Oxford International Publishers, 1999), 83. 36 Soane 76 37 United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization. “Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage” World Heritage Committee Fourteenth Session December 7 -12 1990, (CC-90/CONF.004/2), 3. UNESCO Archives. 38 UNESCO World Heritage Committee. “Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage” Twenty-Eighth Session. Suzhou, China: June 28 – July 7, 2004 (WHC-04/28.COM/26), 24. UNESCO Archives. 39 United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization. “Dresden Elbe Valley: Cultural Site: Nomination for Inclusion on the World Heritage List.” Nomination File 1156

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(2004), 39. Retrieved from UNESCO World Heritage Centre, “UNESCO World Heritage Centre - Decision - 30 COM 7B.77,” UNESCO World Heritage Centre, accessed March 1, 2017, http://whc.unesco.org/en/decisions/1156. 40 United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization. “Dresden Elbe Valley: Cultural Site: Nomination for Inclusion on the World Heritage List.” Nomination File 1156 (2004), 1. Retrieved from UNESCO World Heritage Centre, “UNESCO World Heritage Centre - Decision - 30 COM 7B.77,” UNESCO World Heritage Centre, accessed March 1, 2017, http://whc.unesco.org/en/decisions/1156. 41 UNESCO World Heritage Committee. “Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage” Twenty-Eighth Session. Suzhou, China: June 28 – July 7, 2004 (WHC-04/28.COM/26), 39. UNESCO Archives. 42 United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization. “Dresden Elbe Valley: Cultural Site: Nomination for Inclusion on the World Heritage List.” Nomination File 1156 (2004), 16. Retrieved from UNESCO World Heritage Centre, “UNESCO World Heritage Centre - Decision - 30 COM 7B.77,” UNESCO World Heritage Centre, accessed March 1, 2017, http://whc.unesco.org/en/decisions/1156. 43 United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization. “Dresden Elbe Valley: Cultural Site: Nomination for Inclusion on the World Heritage List.” Nomination File 1156 (2004), 5. Retrieved from UNESCO World Heritage Centre, “UNESCO World Heritage Centre - Decision - 30 COM 7B.77,” UNESCO World Heritage Centre, accessed March 1, 2017, http://whc.unesco.org/en/decisions/1156. 44 United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization. “Dresden Elbe Valley: Cultural Site: Nomination for Inclusion on the World Heritage List.” Nomination File 1156 (2004), 42. Retrieved from UNESCO World Heritage Centre, “UNESCO World Heritage Centre - Decision - 30 COM 7B.77,” UNESCO World Heritage Centre, accessed March 1, 2017, http://whc.unesco.org/en/decisions/1156. 45 United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization. “Dresden Elbe Valley: Cultural Site: Nomination for Inclusion on the World Heritage List.” Nomination File 1156 (2004), 3. Retrieved from UNESCO World Heritage Centre, “UNESCO World Heritage Centre - Decision - 30 COM 7B.77,” UNESCO World Heritage Centre, accessed March 1, 2017, http://whc.unesco.org/en/decisions/1156. 46 United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization. “Dresden Elbe Valley: Cultural Site: Nomination for Inclusion on the World Heritage List.” Nomination File 1156 (2004), 98. Retrieved from UNESCO World Heritage Centre, “UNESCO World Heritage Centre - Decision - 30 COM 7B.77,” UNESCO World Heritage Centre, accessed March 1, 2017, http://whc.unesco.org/en/decisions/1156. 47 United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization. “Dresden Elbe Valley: Cultural Site: Nomination for Inclusion on the World Heritage List.” Nomination File 1156 (2004), 3. Retrieved from UNESCO World Heritage Centre, “UNESCO World Heritage Centre - Decision - 30 COM 7B.77,” UNESCO World Heritage Centre, accessed March 1, 2017, http://whc.unesco.org/en/decisions/1156. 48 United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization. “Dresden Elbe Valley: Cultural Site: Nomination for Inclusion on the World Heritage List.” Nomination File 1156 (2004), 4. Retrieved from UNESCO World Heritage Centre, “UNESCO World Heritage Centre -

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Decision - 30 COM 7B.77,” UNESCO World Heritage Centre, accessed March 1, 2017, http://whc.unesco.org/en/decisions/1156. 49 United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization. “Dresden Elbe Valley: Cultural Site: Nomination for Inclusion on the World Heritage List.” Nomination File 1156 (2004), 82. Retrieved from UNESCO World Heritage Centre, “UNESCO World Heritage Centre - Decision - 30 COM 7B.77,” UNESCO World Heritage Centre, accessed March 1, 2017, http://whc.unesco.org/en/decisions/1156. 50 United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization. “Dresden Elbe Valley: Cultural Site: Nomination for Inclusion on the World Heritage List.” Nomination File 1156 (2004), 80. Retrieved from UNESCO World Heritage Centre, “UNESCO World Heritage Centre - Decision - 30 COM 7B.77,” UNESCO World Heritage Centre, accessed March 1, 2017, http://whc.unesco.org/en/decisions/1156. 51 United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization. “Dresden Elbe Valley: Cultural Site: Nomination for Inclusion on the World Heritage List.” Nomination File 1156 (2004), 84. Retrieved from UNESCO World Heritage Centre, “UNESCO World Heritage Centre - Decision - 30 COM 7B.77,” UNESCO World Heritage Centre, accessed March 1, 2017, http://whc.unesco.org/en/decisions/1156. 52 United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization. “Dresden Elbe Valley: Cultural Site: Nomination for Inclusion on the World Heritage List.” Nomination File 1156 (2004), 81. Retrieved from UNESCO World Heritage Centre, “UNESCO World Heritage Centre - Decision - 30 COM 7B.77,” UNESCO World Heritage Centre, accessed March 1, 2017, http://whc.unesco.org/en/decisions/1156. 53Michael Petzet and John Ziesemer. “Heritage at Risk: Icomos World Report 2006/2007 on Monuments and Sites in Danger. International Council on Monuments and Sites, 63. Accessed august 24, 2017. http://www.icomos.org/risk/world_report/2006-2007/pdf/H@R_2006- 2007_web.pdf. 54 Birgitta Ringbeck and Mechtild Rossler. “Between International Obligations and Local Politics: The Case of the Dresden Elbe Valley Under the 1972 World Heritage Convention” Informationen zur Raumentwicklung 3.4 (2011), 207. 55 City of Dresden, World Mayor. “Waldschlößchenbrücke Bridge and World Heritage Status.” Brochure – Urban Development Department (2006) 10. https://www.dresden.de/media/pdf/broschueren/broschuere_welterbe_engl.pdf 56 United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization. “Convention Concerning the Protection of World Cultural and Natural Heritage.” World Heritage Committee, Thirtieth Session. (WHC-06/30.COM/7B) Paris: 8-16 July 2006, 197-198 Retrieved from the UNESCO Archives, accessed August 24, 2017. http://whc.unesco.org/archive/2006/whc06-30com-7bE.pdf 57 Ibid. 198. 58 City of Dresden, World Mayor. “Waldschlößchenbrücke Bridge and World Heritage Status.” Brochure – Urban Development Department (2006), 4 http://whc.unesco.org/archive/2006/whc06-30com-7bE.pdf. 59 City of Dresden, World Mayor. “Waldschlößchenbrücke Bridge and World Heritage Status.” Brochure – Urban Development Department (2006), 5 http://whc.unesco.org/archive/2006/whc06-30com-7bE.pdf. 60 Henry Chu. Dresden bridge has an unusually high price. Los Angeles Times. October 13, 2009.

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61 City of Dresden, World Mayor. “Waldschlößchenbrücke Bridge and World Heritage Status.” Brochure – Urban Development Department (2006,) 11 http://whc.unesco.org/archive/2006/whc06-30com-7bE.pdf. 62 Ibid. 17 63 Ibid. 11 64 United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization. “Convention Concerning the Protection of World Cultural and Natural Heritage.” World Heritage Committee, thirty-first session. 23 June – 2 July 2007, 81. http://whc.unesco.org/archive/2007/whc07-31com-7Ae.pdf 65 United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization. “Convention Concerning the Protection of World Cultural and Natural Heritage.” World Heritage Committee, Thirtieth Session. 8-16 July 2006, 199. http://whc.unesco.org/archive/2006/whc06-30com-7bE.pdf 66 City of Dresden, World Mayor. “Waldschlößchenbrücke Bridge and World Heritage Status.” Brochure – Urban Development Department (2006), 12 http://whc.unesco.org/archive/2006/whc06-30com-7bE.pdf. 67 Ibid. 16 68 Ibid. 12 69 Henry Chu. Dresden Bridge has an unusually high price. Los Angeles Times. October 13, 2009. 70 Ibid. 71 United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization. “Decision 30 COMM 7B.77: “State of Conservation (Dresden Elbe Valley.” http://whc.unesco.org/en/decisions/1163. 72 Ibid. UNESCO suggested they build a tunnel instead. 73 “Dresden ‘Eyesore’ Elbe Bridge Opens after Unesco Row,” BBC News, August 24, 2013, sec. Europe, http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-23825738.

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Chapter 3 Realizing Utopia: Space and Time in UNESCO’s Memory of the World Program

The United Nations’ legitimacy as a system of global order is realized through documentation. Since its foundation, much of the U.N.’s energy has been dedicated to conventions, guidelines, and declarations, to the production of documents that, if followed, could lead into a new cosmopolitan world order. These documents are the materialization of the U.N.’s utopian vision; they work to bring the future closer to the present by codifying a set of rules and values for global citizens to follow. It is no surprise, then, that the organization imbues historical documentation with a similar sense of cosmopolitan significance. The culmination of past and present documentation is most visible in UNESCO’s Memory of the World Program (MoW).

MoW, collects world documentary heritage in a digital register, is another attempt to hold on to elements of the past so that they are readily available in the future. In a vast online curation of documented heritage that includes articles as diverse as the Bayeux Tapestry, the Phoenician

Alphabet, and American film The Wizard of Oz, UNESCO attempts to collect, preserve and render visible the most important documentary elements of world history. Any cosmopolitan- minded citizen with internet access can browse the list of documented memories that UNESCO considered fit for international preservation, which range from ancient history to the present day.

The program itself is not a utopia; rather it is an attempt to attune its audience toward a process that fulfills a utopian ideal: international relations marked not by war but by democratic, cosmopolitan peace. While this dream is yet unattainable in the realm of international politics,

UNESCO attempts to carve out a digital realm where the vision is temporarily fulfilled.

UNESCO’s documentary heritage collection is an attempt to answer the question that follows each of its cultural programs: how can the organization create a better world? With this guiding question, UNESCO’s MoW program illustrates the complex relationship between

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discourse and materiality, a problem that Dana Cloud argues is essential to rhetorical theory.1

UNESCO’s programs and practices suggest that ideology can precede reality, that a vision of what society could be wields enough power to direct human action toward change. Cloud, however, cautions that this outlook is overly idealistic, and advises rhetoricians to find a middle ground between idealism and relativism.2 MoW, then, is a useful text for analyzing an internationally-focused, western-dominated organization’s attempts to call their world-view into being through rhetorical practice. Through programs enacted by the U.N. and UNESCO, the organization has attempted to put its philosophies into practice, to direct citizens of the world toward utopic opportunities for the future. In political philosophy, utopia is more than a seemingly unattainable place. It is both a potential for the future and a process for reaching that potential.3 MoW serves this purpose for UNESCO; it is a mechanism for drawing attention to the possibility of cosmopolitan citizenship.

In this chapter I analyze the MoW program as mechanism for utopia. The relationship between utopia and mechanism is highly contentious, Marx described utopias as dreams that lacked methods for implementation.4 The assumption that utopias transcend method is too simplistic, as it ignores utopians’ desires to enact change through critique and imagination.

Proponents of the utopian dream consider the recognition of viable alternatives as a way to move forward and enact change.5 According to this line of reasoning, a utopian vision is attainable solely through human actions that mirror the dream. The eventual recognition of utopia is arguably less important than the changes it inspires in the present.

To illustrate the tension between utopia’s function in the present and in the future, I examine the process that underlies UNESCO’s MoW program. Through consideration of the program’s goals for contemporary and future times, I argue that UNESCO uses the digital

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archives as a method of persuasion that redirects their audience from nationalistic thinking to a utopic conception of cosmopolitan citizenship. Their program, however, maintains and protects a cosmopolitanism comprised of distinct and separate cultures around the world, united under the veil of democratic values and standardization of memory.

Recognizing Utopia: From Space and Time to Ideology

The fundamental question utopia poses is how the world may be made better, a mainstay of political philosophy. The process of betterment is understood temporally; the present is regarded as an imperfect rupture in time, while the desire to move backward (nostalgia) or forward (utopia) will lead society to the way it should be.6 Hannah Arendt argued that linearity dominates modern notions of time in western philosophy – to liberals, progress is measured on a linear access in which humanity moves closer toward perfection over time and dark moments in history are regarded as mere disruptions from the past, not indicators of a nonlinear progress.7

Progress is thus understood along a temporal axis. Once on the correct track, societies are expected to follow a positive linear trajectory into the future.

Space takes a subordinate role to time in modern and postmodern philosophy.

Geographer Doreen Massey described space as the container in which progress is measured.

Societies and cultures are defined by spatial borders, and progress is measured within these static limits. Massey argued that although space is considered physical rather than abstract, our understanding of it is constituted through imagination.8 Space is constructed by humans’ understanding of the world, which divides geography into separate nations and places separated by political and ideological values. In her work Massey calls for a new conceptualization of space as a dynamic process defined by social interactions.9 Reimagining space as a measure of

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change rather than mere container, archeologist Setha Low draws upon the concepts of transnational and translocal spaces to elucidate the relationship between people and place.

Transnational space refers to the mobility of people and cultures across borders, while translocal spaces are place to place relationships, the feeling of occupying one’s present locality and the place from which one came simultaneously.10 Low’s terms reveal the rhetorical nature of space: how it constitutes and is constituted through the imagination.

Space and time are sutured to rhetorical theories of international communication, as evidenced by Kendall Phillips and G. Mitchell Reyes’ concept of global memoryscapes. Phillips and Reyes contend that increasing forces of globalization merit attention by rhetorical scholars to the global memoryscape, “a complex landscape upon which memories and memory practices move, come into contact, are contested by, and contest other forms of remembrance; older ways of conceptualizing the past – largely framed in terms of national and local perspectives – are unsettled by the dynamic movements of globalization and new memories and new practices of remembrance emerge.”11 While the newness of globalization is still largely contested – other theorists argue that the forces of globalization have always structured memory and politics – the transnational nature of major events like war constitute a global attunement to memorial practices. Theories of space matter because they constitute cultures’ and societies’ notions of identity and being in the world.

While it is apparent that ideas of space structure our notions of the world around us, the extent to which spatial ideologies dictate the physical world remains a fundamental question.

Dana Cloud argues that the discord between ideology and materiality is an essential problem for rhetorical scholars.12 She identifies two primary positions rhetoricians may take on the issue: that the structure of our environment dictates ideology, or that the symbolic is reality; that everything

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humans experience is mediated through discourse. Cloud suggests a middle ground between the two stances, an ideological critique that names and accounts for materialist influence. Regardless of the extent to which ideology follows reality, the fact that rhetorical agents still try to impose an ideology upon the material world by altering architecture, urban design, and modes of production renders the materialization of ideology a relevant area of study. Ideology likely comes second to reality; however, this fact does not halt political actors from attempting to persuade by reshaping and reimagining their respective realities.

Thomas Rickert describes persuasion as attunement: turning one’s attention to other ways of being.13 Reattunement is achieved through a change in one’s material and linguistic environment, the structures, ideology, and social-political systems that make up one’s world. A problem for UNESCO, then, is how to reattune a cosmopolitan polis in a world that lacks the material and social structures for such a shift. In MoW, the organization seeks to remedy this problem by creating a new space that is already attuned to U.N. values of cosmopolitan identity and citizenship. The ultimate goal is not collection but for the rhetorical force of the archive to exceed its digital space, to exert influence outside of the screen on the daily lives of its audience.

The fundamental role of the digital archive, then, is change through ideological reattunment. To do so, it relies on utopian mechanisms for progress.

In political philosophy, utopia is more than a critique; it is a means for change. The purpose of utopia is to call attention to an alternative way of being, to highlight the flaws of the author’s existing society and to suggest that they do not have to be this way. Tasked with constructing a better future within a suboptimal present, methods for bridging temporal and ideological gaps between past and present are daunting. In many cases, utopia becomes both the ideal and the mechanism for reaching the ideal. The idea of utopia as a political mechanism,

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then, results in an unclear measure of its own fulfillment. On one hand, utopia could set a new political direction in motion by critiquing the current system and suggesting an alternative. On the other hand, utopian dreamers with no further mechanism for bringing a new society into existence may slide into complacency, seemingly comforted by their idealistic vision of what could be. Because the time of its eventual recognition is impossible to pinpoint, the purpose and relevance of utopia is always projected forward to a future date, making debates over its efficacy difficult. Examining exactly how utopia functions within a society, then, is the key to understanding its political mission.

Most closely linked to socialist political theory, utopian socialists were labeled so by other “scientific” socialist thinkers. The prominent socialists Karl Marx and Frederick Engels criticized philosophers such as Robert Owen and Charles Fourier for putting forth idealized visons with no methodological grounding.14 According to Marx and Engels, the ideals of utopian socialists were too far removed from political realities and had no real way to become dominant political practices. Although Marx and Engels drew much of their inspiration from writers like

Fourier, they separated themselves from early socialist philosophers by identifying a target audience who could identify with their politics and carry them forth into existence.15 According to Marx and Engels, the proletariat were more than a disenfranchised group, they were the political actors who would transform their vision from ideal to reality. By focusing on proletariat uprisings, Marx and Engels rejected notions of utopia in their work, claiming the concept had no significant place in political action.

To more idealistic socialist philosophers, though, utopia is the foundation behind any political action geared toward change. Marxist political philosopher Ernst Bloch, for example, traced utopic elements in all layers of culture and society – philosophy, music, art, and discourse

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– that he believed helped move civilizations forward toward a perhaps unreachable ideal. The difference between socialism and other ideologies, he argued, was the former’s forward-thinking manner.16 According to Bloch, social progress requires the rejection of prejudice, false consciousness, and superstition, but “for this very reason it never demands that forward dreams should remain behind.”17 His notion of progress involved expelling negative thoughts that held society back, freeing hope for the future to have a dominant function in political ideology.

Bloch’s mechanism for the future was utopia in action: the pervasion of hope into action and thought.

Each set of philosophers makes claims about the mechanism of utopia: what function of change can it serve, outside of satire and critique? A possible answer can be reached by reviving the distinction between ideology and utopia, as outlined by Karl Mannheim and, later, Paul

Ricœur. To these thinkers, neither ideology nor utopia were based in reality, but key differences separated the two. Ricœur argued that ideology legitimizes the current political order while utopia challenges it.18 The two terms can be taken in contrast to each other: ideology bolsters the system that utopia seeks to diminish. The problem for Ricœur, though, is that both ideology and utopia are forever suspended in the times and places from which they originated. Ricœur concluded his lectures on ideology and utopia by stating, “Ideology is finally a system of ideas that becomes obsolete because it cannot cope with present reality, while utopias are wholesome only to the extent that they contribute to the interiorization of changes.”19 Ricœur’s notion of utopia can never be realized because its entire purpose is to exist as a foil to ideology. When ideology shifts, so does utopia.

This seemingly unbridgeable gap between discursive time and space and that of the material world deserves attention from rhetorical scholars. If one agrees with Ricœur’s assertion

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that utopia and ideology are suspended in a singular time, then it becomes clear that temporality is experienced differently in the discursive and the material world. In discourse, time can speed up (the pull of the future in policy debates), slow down (the pastoral) or it can be suspended altogether.20 Policy becomes ideology when it is presented as timeless: what always was and always will be. Ideology, then, is seemingly atemporal. There is no need to critically examine it because it presumably exists outside of observed time. Utopia functions as a critique of ideology by reinserting it into a standard temporal frame: if utopia is what could be, then ideology could one day exist only in the past. Through this temporal reorientation, utopia challenges ideology.

What takes hold of the future is now in flux.

Even if utopia successfully challenges an existing ideology, it may never be fully integrated into everyday discourse. Realizing utopia requires a second temporal shift: what was first presented as the future must become timeless. Theoretically, a utopia is realized when it crosses from the imagination to ideology. All ideology is utopic in nature; for example, democracy in its purest form, rule directly by the people, is rarely a reality. Instead, it exists in rhetorical form to direct human action closer to the ideal. Achieving utopian aims in the material world, then, demands that existing ideologies are removed and replaced by the utopic vision. For this to happen, the utopia must be adapted for long-term use; it must become, in effect, timeless.

However, this timelessness is a notion that can never be confirmed or negated by the human rhetor. Arendt argued that human’s pursuit of eternal structures is an attempt to evade the impossibility of timelessness.21 Mortality, Arendt claimed, is a fundamental aspect of the human condition.22 Appeals to timelessness, then, are always destabilized by the very nature of human existence. Though the curators of political ideology distort the temporal to appeal to an eternal

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time, the nature of humanity, and ever-present force of the present, always exist in challenge to the utopian vision.

The Temporal and Spatial in Memory of the World

The MoW program addresses the same challenge that underlies all of UNESCO’s projects. Through MoW, UNESCO aims to spread democratic education to all corners of the world. In this particular program documentary heritage is identified as a component of democratic education because the collection tells the story of human development over time, promoting diversity and understanding among its audience. If cosmopolitan citizens have access to historical documents from across the world, they can connect with a history that transcends national boundaries, one that prioritizes democratic progress. In MoW, then, the challenge of spreading democratic education is translated into a quest to make the world’s documentary heritage accessible to all. This is a multilayered process: representatives from MoW must define documents as world history, ensure their relevance in the future, and conjure an international audience through increased publicity and access.

MoW addresses a spatial problem through temporal appeals. The greatest challenge for the curators of MoW is bridging the geographical distances and national boundaries that keep histories separate from one another. Traditionally, documentary memories are confined to sovereign nations; while there is such a thing as “world history,” it is informed through the distinct histories of individual nations. MoW attempts to bridge this gap by constructing a future that condenses the space between nations into a single cosmopolitan humankind. The program does so by positioning the universalization of human experience as inevitable. In the MoW archives UNESCO brings the future forward in time, to portray the disjuncture along national

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boundaries as a thing of the past. This temporal distortion runs both ways: the past, too, is brought forward so that previously separated documents may now converse with one another in a single, digital space. The archival pursuit narrows temporal and spatial gaps through its deferral to an alternative time and place. MoW’s success depends on the extent to which the program enables its audience to see itself as part of a larger, global history that highlights the interconnectedness of otherwise distinct global actors. Thus, the archive’s temporal demands are privileged over the spatial.

Space and time collide in the MoW archives. Disparate regions are brought together through the promise that time collapses spatial distance. UNESCO wrote that the significance of world heritage “is deemed to transcend the boundaries of time and culture, and they should be preserved for present and future generations and made accessible to all peoples of the world in some form.”23 The digital archives were proposed as a way to circumvent the geographical boundaries that kept cosmopolitan citizens from heritage that is rightfully theirs. Digitizing original documents is an act of translation that converts them from their historical form to a new, universally accessible format. UNESCO explains, “Digitized reproductions are not the equivalent of original carriers, whose accessibility is, by definition, limited in time and place.”24

The documents are seemingly suspended in time, preserved in a digital form that prevents deterioration of the source while simultaneously allowing it to exist everywhere at once: documentary heritage can be accessed through the digital register from anyone’s computer, no matter how far removed it stands from the physical document. The documentary heritage is essentially timeless because it is available for continued uptake over the course of history.

UNESCO terms this sense of timelessness “preservation,” an act that ensures “the permanent accessibility – forever – of documentary heritage.”25 The document’s forward progression in

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time ensures its continued significance in the future, when people from all corners of the world become increasingly more connected with one another.

The availability of the world’s documentary heritage in the future is important because at present the archive is incomplete. According to UNESCO, all of the world’s heritage will tell a story about human development. They state, “The world’s documentary heritage is perceived as a whole, the creation over time of communities and cultures which do not necessarily correspond to the nation states of today.”26 MoW proceeds with the basic assumption that world history is a knowable entity, identifiable through disperse documentary fragments. World history, UNESCO theorizes, is temporally lost, as evidenced by the prevalence of war and cultural misunderstandings. But this loss is not permanent. Through the MoW program UNESCO aims to reassemble the world’s scattered documentary history, to bring diverse cultural elements back together to tell a cohesive world history. This utopian aim is evidenced by the program’s preoccupation with missing heritage. UNESCO’s guidelines state, “In every country, significant parts of the documentary heritage have been lost or are missing.”27 UNESCO defines lost heritage as documentation that has already been destroyed, while missing heritage may still exist and should be included in the digital archives if recovered. In theory, these missing or lost documents are just as important as those which have physically survived through history, because without them global remembrance is incomplete. The guidelines continue, “Developing a public record of this now inaccessible heritage is a crucial means of placing the Memory of the

World Programme in context, and is a precursor to the possibility of virtual reconstruction of lost and dispersed memory.”28 Archival documentation of lost or missing heritage is only UNESCO’s first step. Next, the truant heritage must be recovered or recreated and returned to its rightful place in world history.

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MoW’s emphasis on missing history reveals the program’s pursuit of timelessness.

Though UNESCO constantly alludes to a time in the future when citizens around the world stand united in a shared history and identity, it is important to recognize that MoW’s vision of utopia has its roots in the past. The program’s public brochure reads, “In a world where emphasis is placed on speed and where life is becoming increasingly hurried, we must take time to conserve the records of what defines our roots, our past and our existence.”29 The creators of MoW search for evidence of a universal human connection that stretches across history. By assuming that universal humanity is ancient, UNESCO’s cosmopolitan task is not to build an entirely new world order, but simply to return to the original one. This temporal backtracking imbues

UNESCO’s values with legitimacy. Here, originality is the purveyor of truth: the beginning of history is said to speak to a more “natural” state of humanity that MoW documentary heritage articulates. Thus, MoW heritage is “the common moral property of all mankind” because it directs its audience toward a shared humanity.30 This shared humanity will naturally encompass all cultures, from all ends of the world: “It follows that the heritage derives from all parts of the world and all eras of history, and over time the balance of registered items should reflect this fact.”31 UNESCO depicts its archival work as a long but ultimately meaningful task. The MoW program is guided by a compelling vision of the future, but this utopia is marked by an eventual return to an original state of being. As the archives accrue more material, its audience approaches the end of time, a utopia in which citizens of the world are again united.

The end of time, then, obliterates the spatial distinctions of the present. MoW’s ultimate goal is “access without discrimination.”32 UNESCO harbors no illusion that this is the case in the present; politics, copyright laws, and unequal distribution of funding and technological development all create obstacles to universal access. Still, MoW promotes these ideals through a

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narrative of linear human development, with a particular emphasis on technological progress.

Linear progress grounded in technological and scientific development has been a key feature of modernity.33The digital world, in particular, was seen by many optimists as an inherently democratic technology that would close the distance between peoples of the world, ushering in a global public.34 In the 1990s UNESCO sought to harness the unifying force of technology by gathering librarians, archivists, and preservations from around the world into a single digital space where their individual talents could be utilized to their full potential: “The sharing of ideas, resources, and techniques makes for a diverse, multicultural internet with constantly broadening access to the world’s documentary heritage.”35 In the MoW guidelines UNESCO portrays the digital register as an archive that defies modern national borders, allowing viewers to access a picture of humanity without boundaries.

Although MoW presents technology as the key to preservation, the program guidelines also outline the dangers of subjecting items from the past to contemporary archival methods. The guidelines state, “Putting long-term preservation at risk to satisfy short-term access demand is always a temptation, and sometimes a political necessity, but it is a risk that should be avoided if possible. In cases where there is no duplicate access copy, saying ‘no’ is usually a better strategy than exposing a fragile original to possibly irrevocable damage.”36 For MoW, the needs of the future always outweigh those of the present, which is depicted as imperfect but moving in the right direction. MoW prioritizes preservation methods that retain the original form as much as possible. As a result, UNESCO admits that full access may be temporarily barred until the world approaches the ideal time to come. The present, for MoW, will never have the same utopian hold as the idealized past and future. But because MoW operates within contemporary times, the program has had to create a temporal narrative about the less-than-ideal time in which

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documentary heritage is collected.

MoW describes the present as a rupture in time that can only be stitched together when past and future meet. Documentary heritage is at risk in the present because world citizens, swayed by contemporary concerns and nationalistic pride, fail to recognize their true significance. Countless important documents were lost in the twentieth century, UNESCO claimed, due to lack of human effort to prevent damage and neglect. 37 According to the MoW program guidelines, contemporary obstacles to understanding world history were not only neglect, but an unnatural segmentation of world heritage into separate, regional memories.

Through its attempts to rewrite a conclusive world history, MoW implies that citizens have always been connected through a shared humanity. It is possible to recall this cosmopolitan connection through documentary evidence. In the pursuit of a common human cause, the pieces in MoW’s world registry come to symbolize not only the greatest moments in history, but shining opportunities for the future.

The program itself is a way to arrive at this point in the future, not the end result. MoW, then, must find ways to ensure that documentary heritage – the evidence of our shared cosmopolitan roots – is translated into a format that parallels UNESCO’s aims for the future.

This process is an act of both collection and narration. Accruing all of the necessary archival material is only the first step; next, proponents of MoW must imbue each document with a sense of cosmopolitan history. In this process, the document’s significance is extended to the cause of linear human development: the document’s curators ask how it speaks to world history.

UNESCO proves the validity of their world heritage by ensuring that each document meets one or more criteria designed to question the significance of the memory. In addition to screening for authenticity and uniqueness, MoW uses five criteria to analyze the extent to which

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the memory should be universalized. First, the document could be representative of the time in which it was created: the document could symbolize a particular era or represent “a significant social or cultural change.”38 The criterion of time can also mean that the document was the first of its kind; that it was significant in its newness when it was created. The next criterion, place, speaks to the environment in which the document was created. The guidelines explain, “It may contain crucial information about a locality important in world history and culture; or the location may itself have been an important influence on the events or phenomena represented by the document.”39 Place can tell its audience two things about the document: it evokes an area that played a key role in world history, such as the Registry of Slaves of the British Caribbean, which connects the ports to a larger, global narrative, or it elucidates the connection between place and time by demonstrating how the conditions of an important location made the documentary heritage possible.40 The place criterion can also be applied to documents that describes environments or cultures that no longer exist, provided they contribute to the tale of human development.

A third criterion, people, emphasizes the social and cultural background of the document.

A document may “reflect significant aspects of human behavior,” “capture the essence of great movements,” or “reflect the impact of key individuals or groups.”41 This criterion puts a face to the course of human history by depicting individuals or cultures representative of humanity at different places and times. They tell a story of human evolution through social and cultural change. Criterion four, subject and theme, continues this story of linear progression by upholding historical or intellectual developments as key aspects of world heritage. A document that matches this criterion presents developments in “natural, social, and human sciences, politics, ideology, sports, and the arts” as advances that altered the course of world history. Finally,

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criterion five, form and style, speaks to the document itself: does the document represent

“aesthetic, stylistic, or linguistic value”? Like criterion four, this requirement reframes developments in form and style for an international audience. All five criteria are designed to bring out the international in the documentary heritage by demonstrating how specific times and places fade into a sweeping cosmopolitan narrative. MoW does not deny the archived documents their respective historicity, rather, the program uproots documents from their native lands and explains how the documents, through the criteria met, have helped shape the course of human history.

It is not the documentary heritage itself that removes MoW from typical perceptions of place and time; it is the archival process that renders the program utopic. The memories housed in MoW’s digital register all come from distinct times and places, but the register itself exists outside of time. The archival process does not follow a linear historical format. Instead, items in the register are grouped by theme or format. Furthermore, no item is too ancient or too recent to be included: clay tablets, mid-century books, and contemporary films all have an equal chance of acceptance. MoW is a democratization of historical eras. Under the umbrella of international memory, the distinctiveness of different eras of history is flattened to promote a generalized vision of progress.

Place is also eroded within the archive. Although documentary heritage is still identified by its place of origin, the digital archive itself supersedes place. In rhetorical theory, space becomes place when it is entangled with an act of memorialization; the place itself serves an integral role in the memory. MoW demonstrates the reversal of place back into space; although the digital archive provides the structure in which the memories reside, the actual format of the archive is deemphasized. The MoW guidelines acknowledge that digital formats will change over

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time; this change is unimportant because it is not the architecture itself that is significant, it is the cosmopolitan spirit of the enterprise.42 With no dominant place to embody MoW, its audience must instead construct an alternative space – a cosmopolitan utopia – that unites the distinct memories into one narrative. This reversal from place back to space is necessary for the conversion of nationally-housed documents into world heritage. The digital archive provides a new rhetorical framework, a way to approach the documents without evoking feelings of nationality or difference. Of course, memories are rooted in place and no framework can obliterate this completely, but in theory the documents uploaded to this immaterial space become universalized. The appearance of the digital archive is designed to reinforce this sense of universality. However, in the following section I argue that this universal design is still bound by nationality and the separateness of place.

Continual Growth: MoW’s Digital Register (my spatial-rhetorical analysis)

Although the material manifestations of MoW’s archived memory reside within their respective countries, an ongoing list of all documentary heritage registered to MoW is available online, accessible to anyone with internet access. The digital register is not a substitute for the actual documents, some of which do yet have a digital reproduction. The list instead serves as evidence of the existence of shared memory, which can then theoretically be sought out by interested parties. As evidence of the shared, global nature of memory, MoW’s digital register must meet two fundamental challenges: how to provide a space for ongoing additions and transformations, and how to arrange the information in the absence of a dominant spatial/temporal framing.

The vision for the MoW program is to minimize the role of space and time and present all

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documentary heritage as equal in the pursuit of human meaning. In the absence of a definitive categorization method for this utopian project, the archive offers various systems for browsing memory: alphabetical, region and country, and year submit to the archive all contain the full registered list, while access by international days and nominating organization contain fragments of the larger collection. The full list of registered heritage (in alphabetical order) is presented as the first option and is arguably the desired format for MoW: there is no organizational hierarchy based on where the documents come from or when they were produced. But the absence of this hierarchy begets an organizational quandary. How can users find documents that speak to them by scrolling through pages of material with few discernable links to larger categories? The register’s second browsing option, access by region and country, provides a more targeted search. This section divides documents first by region (Africa, Arab States, Asia and the Pacific,

Europe and North America, Latin America and the Caribbean) and then by respective countries within each region. The categories follow the UN’s system of documentation, rather than geographic distribution; thus, Europe and North America are linked and Mexico is included under Latin America and the Caribbean. The classification, then, is about what “types” of people are connected to the document in question, a spatial argument that draws borders through language and culture rather than strict geographical features. It is an argument commonly found in work by the UN, and bolsters the idea that universal memory is discovered through the common links among distinct peoples around the world.

While MoW’s dominant classification systems help users navigate the digital space, they fail to frame the documents in a way that exceeds the boundaries of space and time. Listed apart from the dominant schemas is the option to search by International Day, an alternative based on

UN categories for development. International Days are dates designated by the UN that

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emphasize different values and pursuits. For example, March 21 is World Poetry Day and

December 18 is International Migrants Day. These categories contain only documentary heritage relative to the themes they represent, leaving themes with as little as three entries. The result is an unfinished appearance. But this unfinished nature reflects the spirit of the digital archive, which perpetually accrues new material. As the archive grows, so will entries to categories outside of space and time, allowing increased attention to new ways of understanding and categorizing memory.

The goal that the digital register supports is the democratization of global memory.

Because all documentary heritage is crucial to world history, its documentation in the archive must prioritize its contribution to themes of global development rather than significance to its respective country or region. Each entry includes a brief description of the heritage: the document’s country of origin and year submitted and, more importantly, a short justification for its presence in international memory. Each justification explains what the document can tell its audience about the past; for example, the Bayeux Tapestry is described as “an essential source of information on the way of life in the Middle Ages in general, and the 11th century in particular.”43 The description confirms the universality of memory, as it is said to be representative of the middle ages as a whole, rather than a singular place and moment in time.

Though brief, the descriptions demonstrate the difficulty of assigning universal significance to a regional memory: they prioritize the documents’ account of world history, while other, elements are left out of the narrative. The result is supposedly a harmonious, depoliticized account of the world’s progress; however, contested memories that arise within the program bring space and time back from the utopian to the contemporary.

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Contested Memory of the World

It is difficult to reach international consensus on documentary heritage because memory does not reside only in the past. As Blair, Dickinson, and Ott point out, memories are interpreted and contested in the present because they are representative of contemporary people, places, and political ideologies.44 Because the documentary heritage in MoW still reflects the identities of nations and cultures, those remembered in the archives hold a vested interest in how their stories are told. While many archived memories are relatively benign, others tell stories of torture, enslavement, and oppression that depict one culture as the aggressor, and another the victim.

MoW is clear that it seeks to tell the whole story of human history, and its emphasis on the maltreatment of peoples is intended to heal old wounds, give the oppressed a voice, and ensure that these wrongs never happen again. The problem with universalizing these memories, however, is that they may be recalled differently by the nations involved. UNESCO imposes no time frame for when tragedies may be freed from political constraints to speak to the world at large; consequently, documentary heritage that depicts a nation or political regime in a negative light can become part of a bitter debate about what belongs in international memory. These debates call UNESCO’s aptitude for impartiality into question, ushering the utopian program back into the present. Time and place again come to dominate discourse about the program, reversing MoW’s efforts to transcend them.

In 2015, Chinese archivists submit two collections for inclusion in MoW: memories of the

Nanjing Massacre and records of “comfort women,” Chinese women who were forced into prostitution by Japanese officers who occupied their countries. Both memories were contested by the Japanese government, which accused the Chinese government of using the memories as anti-

Japanese propaganda. The 2014 Chinese nomination form reads, “These archives are of great

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historical value because they unequivocally disclose the historical fact that Japanese troops set up “comfort women lodge” and forcibly recruited “comfort women” in China and Southeast Asia during the war.”45 To Chinese nominators, the “comfort women” documents belonged in international memory because they were an indisputable wrong. The documents to be included in the international register included letters from Japanese soldiers to their families back home, statements from Japanese war criminals confessing to using “comfort women,” and a bank statement that detailed the “532,000 yen spent on establishing a “comfort women lodge” for soldiers. The nomination form reads, “The document clearly records that the ‘comfort women lodge’ was approved by the Kwantung Army Headquarters, revealing that Japan and the

Japanese army directly controlled and implemented this ‘comfort women’ system in a planned way.”46 The Chinese nomination form treated the documentary heritage as evidence of a

Japanese crime. Documents were first used to prove that a “comfort women lodge” existed, and second to frame the Japanese military as the guilty party. The importance of the bank statement was that it directly implemented military commanders. The military’s key role in the issue elevated it to an international war crime worthy of reflection and retribution.

The international nature of the memory was precisely why Japan protested its inclusion in the MoW register. The basis for Japanese opposition to the memory was that recalling the history would have an adverse effect on the country’s contemporary relations with other nations. But the

Chinese nomination form countered that this history was already internationally known, and had been an ongoing issue in international politics. The nomination report listed the times the issue had been brought before international decision-making bodies, including the United Nations. In

1992, for example, Japanese civil delegates had reported the issue to the UN Human Rights

Commission, and in 2014 the UN Human Rights Committee published a statement demanding

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that Japan investigate the “comfort women issue” and formally apologize to the victims.47

Additionally, in the 1990s and 2000s sovereign governments around the world had issued their own statements condemning Japan for its actions. Under this backdrop the MoW seems to pale in comparison; however, it was the MoW nomination that led Japan to halt payments to UNESCO.48

While documentation of the Nanjing Massacre was added to the register in 2015, the acceptance of the “Comfort Women” documents is still pending. At UNESCO’s suggestion, the

Chinese documents were later expanded to include memories of South Korean and Taiwanese women who were also used as sex slaves under Japanese occupation. The Japan Times reported,

“The 2,744 items include statements by former comfort women, related wartime documents and records of activities by groups supporting former comfort women” and was “aimed at restoring the honor and dignity of former comfort women.”49 In 2016, a coalition of Chinese, Japanese, and South Korean activists resubmit the expanded collection to UNESCO, where it was again refuted by Japanese officials.

The Japanese government accused UNESCO of bias toward their country, arguing that the comfort women documents unfairly depicted Japan as an aggressor, while Chinese atrocities were not included in the MoW register. In October 2016, the Japanese government announced that it would halt payments to UNESCO in protest.50 To Japanese officials, UNESCO would violate its own principles of universalism by accepting a still hotly debated memory into its register. After all, UNESCO had touted the program as a way to provide international access to shared memory; therefore, it had a responsibility to ensure that the narratives it progressed were agreed upon by everybody. Around the time that the “comfort women” documents were first submitted to MoW, the Japanese government had sought memorial consensus on its own terms, signing an agreement with the South Korean government in 2015 to move past the trauma. South

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Korea’s submission now not only attracted negative attention to Japan, it reneged on an agreement about how the atrocity would be commemorated within the two countries.

The Japanese government considered the “comfort women” memory unfit for MoW because the issue was not yet resolved; the narrative arc of the memory still needed to be worked out by all parties involved. In considering the collection, UNESCO was pulled into a contemporary debate on the nature of the oppression, one in which place (Japan, Korea, and

China) and time (the history of Japanese occupation) took the forefront. The debate threatened to undermine the value system embraced by proponents of MoW by suggesting that memory cannot be universalized and sealed off. Far from being a closed event that humanity can learn from and move past, the issue of comfort women in Asia remains an open wound that halts humanity’s march into a better future, or worse, a debate that persists into the future – causing UNESCO’s utopia to closely resemble the present.

The Japanese government’s display at being framed as the aggressor, never the victim, is a reminder of UNESCO’s failure to remove memories from the limits of their spatial boundaries.

While cosmopolitan citizens may find it easier to lay claim to the wonders of humanity – the advances in language, art, architecture and technology that shape a positive notion of civilization

– memories of aggression, torture, and discrimination are best contained within the aggressor/victim framework. Because UNESCO considers violence a temporal disruption, something unnatural, it falls short of reaching universal status. Consequently, the painful memories encapsulated in MoW threaten to disrupt the transcendence of spatial-temporal boundaries that defines the program’s key pursuits.

The negative aspects of human history, then, must be contained, rearticulated, or forgotten. These acts of containment and rejection align with dominant ideological foundations

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of international politics, where the “losers” of recent wars are depicted as the primary sources of violence, dominant voices in international relations serve as counters to violence, and other, less powerful nations are typically victims. UNESCO’s commitment to these values is evidenced in both what it remembers and what it deems unworthy of documentation. For example, the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by U.S. forces in WWII is absent from the archive. This act of categorization privileges a linearity not only of time but also of place, where it becomes difficult to grapple with the duality of victim/aggressor that a nation like Japan may represent.

Japanese officials’ resentment about the comfort women documents, after all, is not about whether or not the events in question actually happened, but is directed toward the frustration of being positioned outside of the UN’s temporal axis of development.

UNESCO and MoW are not the only forces of remembrance, and their claims to world heritage are subject to contestation or rejection by other voices in the international community.

These spatial roadblocks reveal the material entanglement of the digital world within the human environment. UNESCO’s attempt to construct a space that stands apart from the limits of contemporary time and place, that exists as a challenge to dominant ideology, is tethered to and determined by the material world.

Conclusion

UNESCO’s desire to exceed time and space in MoW is rendered impossible through the organization’s rootedness in the power structures, political systems, and national ideologies that it seeks to disrupt. MoW heralds universal memory as the path toward a more connected future, but the program reinforces nationality and cultural difference through the structure of the digital archive. Because memories are still assigned a respective nationality, they remain open to

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contestation over their interpretation. This contestation over world heritage undermines the

“universality” of memory by directing attention to conflicting interpretations of the same historical event. Disputes like those over the Japanese army’s use of “comfort women” betray the difficulty of despatializing memory, showing instead that the uptake of national heritage to the international sphere is mired in sovereign nations’ efforts to define themselves.

Even as utopian creators seek to exceed the time and space it derives from, conceptions of utopia are bound to space and time through opposition and contrast. Utopia exists as a critique of a dominant ideology; consequently, to seek its implementation is to succumb to the constraints of the material world. For rhetoric, the ways in which utopia falls short in the material world highlights the problem of invention: how may new material and discursive structures be successfully implemented without taking on the forms of preexisting ideology? While the implementation of utopia remains questionable, its force outside of the dominant ideological structure, as a means of critique, persists.

1 Dana Cloud. “The Materiality of Discourse as Oxymoron: A Challenge to Critical Rhetoric” Western Journal of Communication 58 (1994), 142. 2 Cloud 158. 3 Paul Ricoeur. Trans. Taylor, George H. Lectures on Ideology and Utopia. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 273. 4 Joseph A. Schumpeter. Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy. (New York: HarperCollins, 1979), 306. 5 Ernst Bloch The Principle of Hope, vol. 3. (Cambridge, MIT Press, 1986), 164. 6 Hannah Arendt. Between Past and Future. (New York: Penguin Books, 1954), 65. Arendt argues that modern philosophy emphasizes time and time sequence over other notions of progress and change. Similarly, Doreen Massey argues in For Space that temporality is prioritized over spatiality – time alone is seen as the harbinger of change. 7 Arendt 96. 8 Doreen Massey. For Space. (London: Sage Publishers, 2005), 29. 9 Massey 51. 10 Setha Low. Spatializing Culture: The Ethnography of Space and Place. (New York: Routeledge, 2917), 178 & 180.

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11 Kendall R. Phillips and G. Mitchell Reyes. Global Memoryscapes: Contesting Remembrance in a Transnational Age. (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2011), 13 – 14. 12 Cloud 141. 13 Thomas Rickert. Ambient Rhetoric: The Attunements of Rhetorical Being. (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013), xviii. 14Brian A. McGrail. “Owen, Blair, and Utopian Socialism: On the Post-Apocalyptic Reformation of Marx and Engels” Critique 39.2 (2011), 250. 15 Frederick Engels. Socialism: Utopian and Scientific. (International Publishers Co., Inc., 1935), 33. 16 Ernst Bloch. The Principle of Hope, Volume III. Trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice & Paul Knight. (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1995), 1367. 17 Ibid. 18 Ricoeur, Paul. Trans. Taylor, George H. Lectures on Ideology and Utopia. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986. 19 Ricœur 313-314. 20 Robert Asen. “Reflections on the Role of Rhetoric in Public Policy” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 13.1 (2010) 121-143.; Bradford Vivian. “Witnessing Time: Rhetorical Form, Popular Culture, and Popular Historical Education” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 44.3 (2014) 204-219.; Stephen H. Browne. “The Pastoral Voice in John Dickinson’s First ‘Letter From a Farmer in Pennsylvania’” Quarterly Journal of Speech 9 (1990) 46-57. 21 Hannah Arendt. The Human Condition, Second Edition. (The University of Chicago Press, 1998), 21. 22 Arendt 19. 23 Ray Edmonson for the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization. “Memory of the World: General Guidelines to Safeguard Documentary Heritage. 2002. Paris: UNESCO, 5. 24 Edmonson 10. 25 Edmonson 12. 26 Edmonson 5. 27 Edmonson 28. 28 Ibid. 29 United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization. “Safeguarding the Documentary Heritage of Humanity. Memory of the World: Program Brochure. http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0018/001877/187733e.pdf 30 Edmonson 23. 31 Ibid. 32 Ibid. 33 Arendt 91. 34 Michelle Ballif. “Writing the Third-Sophistic Cyborg: Periphrasis on an [In]Tense Rhetoric” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 28.4 (1998), 55. 35 Edmonson 5. 36 Edmonson 14. 37 United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization. “Memory of the World” Programme: Final Report. Paris, May 3-5, 1995, 2. 38 Edmonson 22.

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39 Ibid. 40 “Registry of Slaves of the British Caribbean 1817-1834” Memory of the World Register. 41 Ibid. 42 Edmonson 17. 43 Memory of the World: Bayeux Tapestry. United Nations Educational, Cultural, and Scientific Organization. http://www.unesco.org/new/en/communication-and-information/memory-of-the- world/register/full-list-of-registered-heritage/registered-heritage-page-1/bayeux-tapestry/ 44 Greg Dickinson, Carole Blair, and Brian L. Ott. Places of Public Memory: The Rhetoric of Museums and Memorials. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2010. 45International Memory of the World. “Archives about “Comfort Women” for Japanese Troops” Nomination Form, Register. 2014, 1. http://www.unesco.org/fileadmin/MULTIMEDIA/HQ/CI/CI/pdf/mow/nomination_forms/china_ comfort_women_en.pdf 46 ibid. 3. 47 ibid 8. 48 Jeff Kingston. “Why is Japan Refusing to Repay UNESCO its Dues?” The Japan Times. October 22, 2016. 49 “UNESCO Memory Status Sought for ‘Comfort Women’ Materials” The Japan Times. June 2, 2016. 50 Edward Vickers. “Japan Scores Tragic Own Goal with UNESCO Stance” The Diplomat. October 21, 2016.

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Conclusion

Although its full implementation in the material world is impossible by definition, the concept of utopia is fundamental to understanding the nature of rhetoric in the material world.

Utilizing utopia in rhetorical studies necessitates an understanding of the nature of invention and demands attention to the elusive mechanisms of creation and enforcement. By applying utopia to rhetoric, scholars can extend the study of persuasion to a dynamic, give-and-take process of discursive attention and material implementation. The concept of utopia explores the mechanisms for addressing the uncertainty of persuasion by highlighting the inherent contradictions in the process of betterment: while utopia re-attunes humans to new possibilities, it remains dependent on current ideologies and systems. Through rhetorical analysis of these spatial-temporal processes, critics can elucidate the connection between rhetorical agents and the environments in which agents seek to enact change.

A utopian rhetoric is fundamentally concerned with how the future will unfold. While rhetorical texts at times emphasize the importance of the past or the exigence of the present, persuasion comes to fruition at a later time. Through my analyses of the United Nations’ mechanisms for reaching its utopian aspirations, I advocate for a method of rhetorical criticism that interrogates rhetorical agents’ efforts to restructure their existing environments over an extended period of time to question how agents seek to shape their social environments over years or decades. Using utopia as a rhetorical lens for such analyses, I argue, enables scholars to rethink the nature of kairos and invention, to see persuasion as a mechanism of creation, and to consider the limits of persuasion as a material force.

Through the U.N.’s efforts to draft and implement the Universal Declaration of Human

Rights, the organization demonstrated the temporal limits of kairos, which emphasizes right time

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and persuasion through available means. Working within a present that was not conducive to the changes leaders of the UN hoped to implement worldwide, the drafters of the declaration blended appeals to the past, present, and future to write the document and advocate for its passage. The UN’s most persuasive mechanism was the construction of and deferral to time. In crafting a vision of a perfect future, the Commission on Human Rights was able to relegate the usefulness of its document to a time not yet reached.

While the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was meant to craft a notion of what the world could be under a cosmopolitan democratic-capitalism that hinged on individual rights, the

U.N.’s cultural programs were designed to bring such a world into being. Members of the UN understood that the act persuasion does not end at invention but continues through the mechanisms of creation and enforcement. In Dresden, the UN sought to enact its cosmopolitan vision upon a physical site of remembrance. The process of translation from ideal to physical space is imperfect, and in Waldschlößchenbrücke and the site’s delisting the World Heritage

Committee discovered the limits of its own authority to impose a system of change upon local populations. This act of translation may have been unsuccessful in Dresden; however, the World

Heritage Committee’s efforts demonstrated the crucial role physical spaces play in rhetoric and persuasion.

The act of persuasion is a material force and thus faces material limitations to its scope and influence. In its Memory of the World program, the UN’s attempts to transcend spatial and temporal limitations in the pursuit of a utopian approach to memory and world history were superseded by international relations and political concerns. Utopia is never realized because the vision it puts forth is beholden to the environment it arises from. The impossibility of escaping space and time makes utopia a theoretically-rich concept: although utopia remains a discursive

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ideal, elements of the vision may be adapted into the environment’s structures and systems through creation and implementation. Utopia, like rhetoric, serves an imperfect function. The

UN’s Memory of the World program did not evade the politics of its time, yet it remains available as a critique of national memory and an embodiment of the UN’s cosmopolitan pursuits.

Applied to rhetorical studies, utopia also challenges the ethics of the UN’s international practices. Ultimately, the UN’s leaders tried to impose democratic-capitalism worldwide; thus, it acted as a politically-motivated body that sought to influence through its rules and programs.

While the UN has enabled significant advances in human rights and foreign aid, its efforts to enact change upon the existing order merit scrutiny. In its creation and enforcement of universal norms, the UN seeks to transfer control from the local and national to the international. The act of materializing utopia, though, varies from space to space. In focusing its goals on the attainment of one way of being, the UN applies ill-fitting standards for development upon local populations. In other words, the UN’s utopian vision of a cosmopolitan peace grounded on democratic capitalism is more suitable to some spaces than others.

In addition to many persuasive pitfalls that the concept of utopia makes clear, it also clarifies the importance of the future in all rhetorical acts. While utopias are never fully realized, elements of their discursive vision can influence the structure of the environments in which they arise. Utopia’s strength comes from its propensity for critique: utopias are invented to remedy a perceived wrong – first discursively, and later through structural change. Through tracking utopian ideas from creation to implementation, rhetorical scholars can better account for both the nature of persuasion and the purpose rhetoric serves in the material world. Rhetoric is utopian because it relies not only on kairos but on actively inventing the means for its own fulfillment.

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These acts of invention extend past the present into the foreseeable and unforeseeable future.

Through mechanisms of enactment and enforcement, utopian rhetorics illustrate the power of rhetoric to actively induce change. Persuasion, a utopian force, is beholden to the future.

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