What is a Nation-State? Family, Tribe, Clan, Ethnic Group, State

HUMAN RIGHTS The City-State of Athens Aeschylus’s “ Oresteia” and Sophocles’s “Antigone” Vietnam, Lyndon Johnson and the Bombing of Hanoi (“How Are My Boys?”) Iraq: Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds Syria

HUMAN RIGHTS A Nation-State? What is a Nation-State? Families, Tribes and Citizens

HUMAN RIGHTS There’s an old Bedouin Proverb: “My brother and I are against my cousin. My cousin and I are against the whole world.” It captures the human condition far better than Thomas Hobbes’s “man is wolf to man.”

HUMAN RIGHTS It is generally thought that a commitment to human rights is caught in the tension between morality and politics. The “Problem of Dirty Hands” puts the Prince in just such a bind, torn, as he can be, between being good and doing what’s best for the members of the community over which he presides, between being moral and being politic.

HUMAN RIGHTS But the dilemmas faced by the leaders of states who wish to respect the human rights of those who live outside their borders or those, within their midst, who do not have the status of full citizenship is not captured by the distinction between morality and politics, but by the distinction between ethics and morality and the distinction between thick and thin relations.

HUMAN RIGHTS The Bedouin proverb makes sense in a world of thick relations. It expresses a view of human life that it is not appropriate to call “tribalism” and it maintains itself in the solidarity of its members coupled with an indifference and at times hostility its members show to the rest of the world.

HUMAN RIGHTS Citizenship Begins with Membership Membership in a Political Community Minority Rights v. Human Rights Canada, the U. S., France, the Netherlands, Denmark, Tibet, India, China, Egypt, Syria