Woodrow Wilson revisited: Human rights discourse in the foreign policy of the George W. Bush Administration

Abstract

The George W. Bush Administrations presented foreign policy in terms of universal liberal values, including human rights. This has led to a number of scholastic comparisons being drawn with the foreign policy of Woodrow Wilson. This article seeks to contribute to this debate by identifying and accounting for three internal rules common to the human rights discourse expressed by the Wilson and Bush Administrations. Bush is argued to indeed be an inheritor of the Wilsonian legacy but not because the Administrations were characterized by the naive advocacy of idealistic values. Instead, human rights have been discursively co-opted by both Presidents as a technique of governance in the sense of producing reality by insisting on one specific interpretation of identities and intents.