Human Rights Quarterly

It is almost conventional wisdom that human rights norms emerged in the process of political, economic, and social modernization. Specifically, that civil and political norms emerged as tribal confederations, kingdoms, and empires, including colonial empires, became states, and the residents within them evolved from being subjects of chiefs, kings, or emperors to being citizens of the newly emerged states. At the same time, new social and economic norms emerged as agriculture, mining, and craft production for subsistence and local consumption were replaced by plantation agriculture, large-scale mining, and industrial production for distant markets.

In some iterations this long-term global modernization process presents itself as teleologically progressive. But, in fact, these modernizing processes were massively disruptive, dislocating, exploitative, and violent. Many states were created by internal or external wars. Even more states determined their boundaries through warfare with neighboring states. Additionally, the states that were formed out of kingdoms and empires in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were not the abstract state of liberal political theory. Rather they were, as World Divided makes vividly clear, nation-states—the idea, still very much alive in today's world, that a "state" should be associated with a particular "national group" or sometimes "national groups."

As Eric Weitz seeks to tell us, in the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, nation-states became the predominate model of the modern world. Parts of this story, including the ethnic mayhem, are well known, or at least have been told before, for example in Andreas Wimmer's social science survey, Waves of War: Nationalism and Ethnic Conflict in the Modern World.¹ What Weitz adds to this story, which he tells in multiple "emblematic" accounts is the explicitly human rights part of these struggles. In particular, most of the new nation-states took the form of republics, in which, at least nominally, power was held by the people and their elected representatives. Thus, nation-state formation usually provided the institutions of classic republicanism—real or supposedly representative government bodies and parliaments, a judiciary, and a constitution that recognized and protected rights.

After 1948 or so it is possible to speak of international human rights, but as Weitz notes, "[i]n our divided world of 193 sovereign nation-states, we have rights, first and foremost as national citizens."² And this invariably entails that each sovereign nation-state has to decide who within it gets to be a rights-bearing citizen, that is, who has "the right to rights."

Answering this fundamental question necessarily results in what Professor Weitz terms "population politics"—which all too often turns out to be large-scale massacres, what we now call "ethnic cleansing," or what was euphemistically termed "population exchanges" or "population unmixing." Thus, both nation-state formation and the emergence and application of human rights norms [End Page 226] within a nation-state is often a very oppressive and messy project. Hence, the subtitle to World Divided: The Global Struggle for Human Rights in the Age of Nation-States.

Weitz begins his story in post-Napoleonic Europe, with the American and French revolutions having already introduced the model of including "rights" into state-forming declarations and constitutions along with classic republican institutions. He then traces the influences of nationalism, colonialism (including the so-called "scientific racism" that accompanied overseas conquests in the late nineteenth century) along with the break-up of older empires in Europe and the formation and break-up of newer, and often overseas empires, and the new states created from the newer nineteenth century and turn of the twentieth century empires.

Weitz tells the story of this global struggle through nine "emblematic" case studies in which some examples achieved nation-statehood, while others did not and where some "populations" received "the right to rights," while others did not. His case studies include;

• • carving Greece out of the Ottoman Empire;

• • the removal of indigenous Native American...