Quale scontro culturale? L’urgenza di risignificare l’universalità dei diritti (e di salvarli)

This paper challenges the overestimation of the risks for human rights of a cultural pluralism defined by using vague definitions of ethnic groups, or peoples, or nations. Both communitarian and universalist positions have taken for granted the existence of cultural juridifiable instances that, in the best of cases, can coexist in a multiculturalist perspective. I underline the ideological dangers and the «identity traps» implicit in this perspective, in the context of the contemporary turning point that sees the crisis not only of the effectiveness of human rights, but also of their definition as a limit to political power. Two examples concretely decline these criticisms: the culturalist instrumentalization of women’s rights and the contemporary exercise of the right to asylum by people defined as belonging to other cultures in the face of the cancellation of this right by countries that claim to be founded on a culture of rights. In conclusion, these pages pose the question of how to re-signify the universality of rights in order to save them, in the context of the only significant cultural clash between an institutional culture of cancellation of rights, and a culture of a critical resistance for rights.