General Augusto Pinochet is an unlikely hero and the British House of Lords an unlikely agent for the trans-national rule of law. But together they conspired to dramatise what has been one of the most conspicuous and hopeful features of international affairs in 1998: the growing universalisation of political ethics.
Immanuel Kant's maxim, put forward after the French Revolution, seemed to be coming nearer to realisation 200 years later as the world marked the 50th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: "A right violated in one part of the world is felt everywhere."
Journalism is concerned properly and inescapably with daily events. Normally they are presented in different categories of context and meaning, usually in terms of home, world and economic news. These distinctions remain valid. But they are also crumbling under the intrusion of each category on the others, another striking feature of this year's events.
Politics was reasserted over markets after neo-liberal excesses in Asia and Russia; such priorities were questioned by a new majority of governments in the European Union preparing to introduce the euro from January 1st.
The Pinochet case perfectly illustrates these realities, as governments grapple with the contradictory demands of state sovereignty, universal legal norms and patterns of trade in deciding how to respond. Which of them should command the greatest commitment?
The Pinochet case typified a genuine trend. This was the year an international court was agreed to try crimes against human rights - but only after tortuous, arguably crippling restrictions and, notably, the outright refusal of the United States to participate on grounds of national interest.
In The Hague this month the Bosnian war crimes tribunal started hearings against General Radislav Krstic, one of the main Serb generals in the war, who stands accused of genocide, and crimes against humanity.
Belated pre-emptive international action led by the US headed off the worst excesses of the conflict in Kosovo. Throughout the year international legal claims were mounted on behalf of Holocaust victims whose property was stolen. The trial of Anwar Ibrahim in Malaysia expressed and negated the relativist Asian values proclaimed by the country's leader, Mohammed Mohatir.
Chinese leaders continued to hold fast to state sovereignty; but an important condition for their international political engagement came with commitments given to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Mary Robinson, that they will adhere to several of its most important instruments. Although this can easily be dismissed as token, political ethics grow in the cracks between such undertakings and repressive state behaviour. Mrs Robinson often makes the point that the essence of rights is that they are empowering. They take on real content in political struggles.
Political ethics of a different kind assailed President Clinton during his visit to Beijing, where he insisted on the universality of human rights. The Lewinsky affair threatened to disable the final years of his presidency and may still do so. One way or another it certainly dramatised the question of whether the personal ethics involved should become political and, if so, on what scale.
Especially noteworthy was the consistent divergence between Washington's political elites, who became fixated with it, and the much more sceptical popular mood.
It was a good year for the Secretary General of the United Nations, Kofi Annan. In February, he skilfully brokered a diplomatic way out of the confrontation between Iraq and the West. Diplomacy eventually failed, of course, and war broke out, involving the US and Britain. This month he made progress in bringing the Lockerbie affair to an international court.
Writing in this newspaper's Developing World supplement on human rights on November 4th, Mr Annan made the following important points: "We must insist on greater respect for civil and political rights and on the building of democratic societies. But, equally, we must insist that due attention be given to economic, social and cultural rights.
"Mass illiteracy and poverty are human rights issues no less than freedom of expression, and the wilful disregard of the former is as likely to sow the seeds of conflict as the denial of the latter. For the 1.3 billion people in the world who must survive on less that $1 a day, there can be no doubt about the link between development and human rights."
The crushing blows of economic mismanagement and regime disintegration brought back mass poverty to millions of Indonesians and Russians. They are among the world's largest states, it must be remembered.
Their fate stimulated a growing debate about the role of the International Monetary Fund and the other Bretton Woods institutions in regulating the world economy, so much so that the IMF devoted a great deal of attention to its agreement with another large state, Brazil, to prevent it succumbing to the speculative contagion that afflicted Asia, thereby profoundly internationalising the crisis.
So far that has not happened to the extent feared. It may well be that the economic fundamentals are not such as to trigger a depression; but it was especially worrying how often talk of such a possibility surfaced in the most serious commentary. And we have not by any means seen the last of the Russia's political and economic disintegration.
Russian pride is deeply affected. There is a nostalgia for great power status and a determination among elites not to let neighbouring countries fall to an enlarging NATO.
In the long view of Russian history, conditions seem ripe for a strong man; despite the increasing immiseration there are few signs of popular resistance from below, demanding that the last corrupt businessman be strangled in the guts of the last free market ideologue. The democratic reform project retains support, but it has been lamentably mismanaged.
Elsewhere, in central and eastern Europe and the Baltic states, it has been much more effectively handled. Russia's instability has reinforced their elites' determination to join the European Union as a zone of peace, security and prosperity; for Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic which join NATO next year (sub-1999), that alliance is seen in the same light.
The Asian crisis and Russia's predicament overhung plans to introduce the euro, giving it further credibility as a project designed to bring coherence and stability to the European economy. Notwithstanding its undoubted economic rationale, the euro has been politically designed and driven, reminding us that public institutions are the product of human agency and choice, not, as seemed to underlie so much of the neo-liberal orthodoxy in ideological retreat all year, mere epiphenomena of market forces.
Left to themselves those forces neglect social justice, cohesion and solidarity, and universalise political and ethical demobilisation.
Such insights were given dramatic focus by the outcome of Germany's federal elections in September, which brought the Social Democrats to power with the Greens. The outcome was more radical than a cautious campaign might have led the German electorate and an anxiously watching world to expect. After the ex-communist Massimo d'Alema became Italian prime minister it suddenly dawned that most EU governments were on the social democratic left.
There was much discussion of where the new centre of political gravity would lie. With Tony Blair's position, which he defined as follows at his party conference in Blackpool: "There are three choices. Resist change - futile. Let it happen - laissez-faire; each person for themselves, each country for itself. Or the third way: we change, modernise, reform."?
Or with a rather more radical approach expressed by the new power broker of Germany's coalition, Oskar Lafontaine, who called for macro-economic co-ordination to reduce unemployment as the euro in introduced, lower interest rates, pegging its value with the dollar and a determined effort to reform the Bretton Woods institutions?
Suddenly much of the neo-liberal orthodoxy in which the euro was clothed began to look less secure, or at best insufficient.
Politics could make a difference, alternatives are possible, human agency and moral choice matter. Social democrats in office are grappling with a problem defined by the German political theorist Jurgen Habermas: "Ironically, developed societies at the end of the century are confronted with the return of a problem which, under the pressure of system rivalry, they just seemed to have solved. "It is a problem as old as capitalism itself. How to exploit the allocative and discovering functions of self-regulating markets effectively without having to accept unequal distribution and social costs which are at variance with the preconditions for the integration of liberal societies."
It would be unwise to expect too much - social democrats in office are notable for their timidity in tackling the international framework of their policies. Habermas has been a prominent voice calling for much more debate about how to create democratically accountable means of regulating an increasingly interdependent world, effectively to domesticate inter-state relations.
That is a huge task for the next century. It will not be tackled without a combination of reason and ethics, universality and diversity. That Enlightenment tradition has been out of fashion in our post-modern and realistic age.
It is to be hoped the worm is turning.