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Giancarlo Monina, Diritti umani e diritti dei popoli. Il Tribunale Russell II e i regimi militari latinoamericani (1971-1976), Carocci editore, Roma 2020.

AbstractThe article discusses the evolution from the 1966–1967 "first" Russell Tribunal, an unofficial and political gathering that censured the USA for its aggression in Vietnam, to the "second" Russell Tribunal, which took place in Rome and Brussels between 1974 and 1976 and put human rights violations in Latin America in the international spotlight. Both Tribunals shared a profound anti-Americanism and an explicit proximity to Third Worldism. Yet, there was also an important difference, since the language of human rights shaped only the "second" Tribunal. The article is mostly based on documentary sources held by the Fondazione Lelio and Lisli Basso in Rome. This choice is based on the importance Italian Senator Lelio Basso had for the Tribunal. Basso was the main organizer and the driving force of the Tribunal and coordinated many transnational groups in support of this event. Moreover, his intellectual reflections on decolonization as a revolutionary force and his fierce anti-Americanism offered a blueprint for the proceedings and the sentence of the Tribunal. Bringing together the recent literature on the emergence of human rights during the 1970s and that on European anti-Americanism, the article shows how some prominent European intellectuals and politicians appropriated human rights jargon to criticize American foreign policy and denounce its responsibilities for ongoing human rights violations in Latin America. In doing so, it argues that the human rights language renewed European anti-Americanism during the 1970s.

European Political Cooperation represented one of the most innovative and yet vague and contested areas of cooperation among EC Member States. As an intergovernmental practice that left no room for supranational institutions, it did not contemplate any formal role for the European Parliament (EP). Focusing on the EP and EPC after the 1979 elections, this article aims at making three points. First, it argues that direct elections gave the EP stronger political arguments to claim more powers but parliamentary demands on EPC were not different from those emerged already in the early Seventies. Second, given Member States' resistance to parliamentary pressures, the EP developed some original initiatives in international affairs, in order to undermine the intergovernmental features of EPC. Parliamentary actions were particularly effective on human rights issues. Finally, it points out that with the signing of the Single European Act, the role of the EP in foreign affairs remained, at best, limited.

The article focuses on the European Parliament and the development of the European Political Cooperation (EPC), the first attempt to harmonize EC member states' national foreign policies into a single European framework. Being an intergovernmental policy, developing outside of the Treaties, the European Parliament had no official role in the development of the EPC. Yet, it challenged member states' monopoly over foreign relations through some autonomous initiatives and forced them to accept small increase in the Parliament's powers of scrutiny over the EPC. Once the European Council accepted the introduction of direct elections, the European Parliament could legitimately claim a greater role on the development of the EPC: being the only elective institution it could assure a democratic oversight over the EPC. By assuring a (limited) role to the European Parliament, the EPC remained an intergovernmental field of actions, although it now contemplated some supranational features.

The past decade has seen an explosion of scholarly work on the European Community (EC)'s attempts to develop an international role during the 'long 1970s'. This is hardly surprising: historians tend to follow the opening of the archives, and now is the best moment to examine primary sources from the period. There are, however, two further reasons for this growing interest in European integration during the 1970s. Firstly, writing in the aftermath of the crisis in relations between the United States and Europe provoked by the US's global war on terrorism and at the height of the European financial crisis, many scholars – historians and political scientists alike – have looked back at the crisis of the 1970s, searching for precedents, similarities and differences. Secondly, thanks to the number of studies now available, the decade is widely recognised as a pivotal period of global transformation – a period in which new global dynamics produced radical change for Europe and for the international system as a whole. In many ways, this decade represented a crisis of modernity that saw the emergence of new actors and processes. Cold War categories became too rigid to usefully define – or even explain – an increasingly pluralistic world, in which new international actors, ranging from transnational grassroots movements to international institutions and regular international summits, began to play major roles. The oppressive but unambiguous Cold War order started to crumble, and a new one, characterised by 'interdependence' and 'globalisation', began to emerge. The effects of this transformation were particularly dramatic for Europe: it was in the seventies that Europe 'entered a different world'.

"During the 1970s human rights took the front stage in international relations; fuelling political debates, social activism and a reconceptualising of both East-West and North-South relations. Nowhere was the debate on human rights more intense than in Western Europe, where human rights discourses intertwined the Cold War and the European Convention on Human Rights, the legacies of European empires, and the construction of national welfare systems. Over time, the European Community (EC) began incorporating human rights into its international activity, with the ambitious political will to prove that the Community was a global "civilian power." This book brings together the growing scholarship on human rights during the 1970s, the history of European integration and the study of Western European supranational cooperation. Examining the role of human rights in EC activities in Latin America, Africa, the Mediterranean, Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, The Human Rights Breakthrough of the 1970s seeks to verify whether a specifically European approach to human rights existed, and asks whether there was a distinctive 'European voice' in the human rights surge of the 1970s"--