The Nation-State and its Refugees: Is Abuse of Human Rights Inevitable?

Meir Amor

Since the Peace Treaties of 1919 and 1920 the refugees and the stateless have attached
themselves like a curse to all the newly established states on earth which were created in the
image of the nation-state. Hannah Arendt (1979, 290).

Introduction: A Problem and Theoretical Setting

While there were a total of 63 member states in the League of Nations (1920–1946), there are 193
member states in the current United Nations (2017)1. Even inhabitable Antarctica is nationalistically
divided or claimed2. There is no “nationalistically free” habitable land on the face of the earth.
Unquestionably and easily verifiable empirically, the nation-state as a strategy and as a principle is
the epitome of nineteenth and twentieth century modernization processes. Becoming modern meant
and still means a nation-state creation. Against well-known predictions, neither the state nor the
nation-state “withered away.” They are ubiquitous; still all around us.
However, the convoluted relations between modern national citizenship and human rights
continue to be hotly debated (Parekh 2004). This is especially true in nation-states with high-intensity
nationalistic claims. This is the case mainly because the right to self-determination of the nation’s
sons and daughters tends to demodernize the civic and political rights of the state’s citizens.
Evidently, the “nation” and the “state” are two opposing political principles forced into uneasy
coexistence by a hyphen and the restless reality of the “nation” within the nation-state.
Indubitably, there are more “candidates for nationhood” (Geertz 1963) than the availability of
territory into which the globe can be parceled to nations. Manifestly, national self-determination’s
zeal tramples formal state’s citizenship status. Expansion of racist discourse and practices, and
transformation of citizens into refugees are the main processes by which civic and political rights of
state’s citizens are thwarted. Hence, now as in the past, nation-states denationalize and denaturalize
citizen rights. Such policies make citizens into strangers in their own homes; strangers who become,
to various degrees, homeless, stateless, and rightless people. They lose rights to have a home, to a
recognized civil status, and to a meaningful right to express and act upon their opinion. In other
words, their human rights are abused. They are forced into a new status of people who have no right
to have rights (Agamben 1995; Arendt 1994 [1943], 1979, 267).
Evidently, the emergence of nation-states epitomized modernization. Adam Smith’s The Wealth
of Nations published in 1776 never intended but was highly suggestive as a prophetic indication of
the “national” entrepreneurial trend. Nevertheless, many would agree that the tension between
national self-determination and human rights is of a more recent provenance. National rights tend not
only to rescind state’s citizens’ civic status, but also to demodernize inclusionary political initiatives.

1
 As to the League of Nation see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Member_states_of_the_League_of_Nations visited on
July 8, 2017. As to the United Nations see: http://www.un.org/en/sections/about-un/overview/index.html visited on July
8, 2017.
2
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antarctica visited on July 8, 2017.
They do so by fueling exclusionary racist social movements and violently creating refugees. These
are the consequences that define demodernization as a political process in the framework of this
chapter.
Clearly, demodernization is not an inevitable consequence or sequential process to
modernization. Demodernization is a historical, social, and political variable. The important point is,
however, that the politics of excluding “the other” and the politics of including “our kind” are
simultaneous and concurrent activities. That is to say, demodernization does not follow
modernization when it has been “achieved” or “accomplished.” Rather, they occur concurrently. They
coincide. They are the proverbial two faces of the coin of political dynamics.
The temporality of demodernization is synchronized diachronically into the modernization
process. The creation of a nation in a state—what Hannah Arendt called the transformation of the
state from an instrument of the law into an instrument of the nation—is a concurrent process of
inclusion into modernity of the nation’s sons and daughters and the exclusion from modernity of
others who are, or can be deemed “only” as citizens of the state (Arendt 1979, 275). Modernization
as inclusion into modernity, defines demodernization as the exclusion of some, from formal and
political equality within the nation-state.
The sociological perspective has in store insightful observations regarding these intricate
processes. In fact, a nonobvious sociological perspective highlights aspects otherwise shaded in these
developments; aspects that are crucial for understanding the modernity, modernization, and
demodernization processes. In this regard, three counterintuitive insights will be presented: first, the
nonobvious critical sociological approach to modernity’s presumed roots in rational or contractual
formation theories of the nation in a state; second, the emotional and religious roots of occidental
citizenship; and third, the inherent enormous difficulties nation-states face in protecting human rights.
Classical Enlightenment philosophers such as Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778), Jeremy
Bentham (1748–1832), John Stuart Mill (1806–1873), or even Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679)
perceived citizenship as a by-product of the social contractual theory. More recent scholars, such as
John Rawls, assumed such contractual premises as the basis for social justice theories in modern
states (Dahan 2007; Mills 1997; Nbete 2012; Pateman 1988; Rawls 1971). For such Enlightenment
and modern philosophers, “society” was a product of social (consensual or enforceable), conscious,
rational, or even utilitarian contractual agreements.
In contrast to these contractual theories, nonobvious sociology argues that society (or group
membership) is rooted in emotional ties and religious rituals that constitute pre-contractual social
bonds (Collins 1992; Durkheim 1976, 1963, 1957, Zeitlin 2001, 338). Such an implicit emotional
perception is buried also in Max Weber’s occidental citizenship theory (1946). Weber tied
citizenship’s development in general and modern occidental citizenship in particular with a specific
mixture of emotional ties to the logic of monotheistic theology. These ties have a similar, though
variable, inherent tendency toward rationalization and democratization of God’s grace as a
universally open path to salvation. Citizenship, as a secular and modern institution, he argued, is
rooted in these soteriological as well as eschatological religious processes manifested in various
forms of historical binding oaths.
Last, the sociological perspective is useful, original, and counterintuitive with its
interpretation of national self-determination, citizenship, and human rights. Many perceive human
rights to be a celebratory moral demand presented by modernity and derived from the effort to assert
universal moral claims (Fein 1977; Wasserstrom 2001 [1964]). Conventional wisdom traces human
rights to the American and French Revolutions’ foundational documents. Whereas many would
emphasize the continuity and convergence of national self-determination, citizenship, and human
rights, nonobvious sociology emphasizes the rupture, discrepancy, and conflict between them (Arendt
1979, 1994 [1963]; Butler 2011; Parekh 2004, 2008). These ruptures are significant and current-day
political issues; the sociological perspective has insightful and refreshing ideas to state about them.
Hence, the usefulness of the sociological perspective to issues of modernization and
demodernization is going to be demonstrated by examining the inherent tension between national
self-determination, civic citizenship, and human rights. In contrast to implicit or even explicit
approaches of convergence theories of citizenship and human rights, nonobvious sociology argues
that problematizing human rights highlights modernity’s national self-determination and citizenship
failures—not successes. For example, the failure to (a) accommodate the social fact of the world’s
plurality, namely, that it is cohabitated by diverse people, (b) accept the constancy of viewpoints’
diversity and their politics, and (c) recognize the inherent contradictions ushered in by modernity and
the establishment of a global, international system of territorially defined nation-states.
 
A NonObvious Sociological Gem: The Irrational Basis of Rationality
At the outset of presenting several insights from the nonobvious sociological approach’s relevancy
to modernization and demodernization, let me start with one of its most counterintuitive arguments,
namely, rational thought has irrational origins. This is an insightful hypothesis that can shed bright
light on the national self-determination politics of exclusion.
The irrational root of rationality argument is a straightforward, simple, and profound
sociological gem. Highlighting and indicating the hypothesis’s productivity achieves at least two
aims. First, it establishes the possible relevancy and uniqueness of the sociological imagination as a
disciplined social science to modernization and demodernization. Second and more importantly, it
manifests the sociological promise’s richness and indispensability (Mills 1959, 5) in understanding
modernization and demodernization as reflected in the tension between national self-determination
and citizenship and human rights.
According to C.W. Mills the sociological perspective enhances self-understanding by
associating “personal troubles of milieu” with “public issues of social structure” (ibid. 8). Therefore,
he argued, self-clarification and understanding could be achieved by associating biography and
history. Such an association and intellectual exercise, he asserts, elucidate the meaning of the
sociological promise. It does so to such a degree that some people might “…experience a
transvaluation of values” (ibid 8). Specifically, the sociological perspective can assist “us” in seeing
structural “traps” in which our private lives are ensnared and “…realize the cultural meaning of the
social sciences” (ibid 3, 24). Clearly, consciousness transformation is not a trifle matter. Suggesting
“refugees” as such a modern structural “trap” enhances our understanding abilities of modernity’s
dynamics and illuminates buried foundations of the modern world values structure.
In this regard, Emile Durkheim (1976) argued that knowledge of the world, of oneself, and of
one’s group is intimately related to the cultivation of magic and spirits (omnipotent, omniscient, and
omnipresent forces). That is, he argued that understanding and knowledge are intimately related to
religion.
 Religion, according to Durkheim, depends on two crucial aspects: strict separation between
sacred and profane realms, and the existence of a “church” (a community). Put simply, religion
depends on the existence of distinct holy “things,” “events,” and “places” for groups (Durkheim
1963). In Durkheim’s formulation, religion is the source of knowledge, technology (know-how), and
science (logic) of the world. Understanding, logic and knowledge necessitate conceptions of time and
space.
For example, Durkheim argued that conceptualization of time derives from the regulated,
recurrent, and consecrated family, clan, and tribal gathering occasions. So is the conceptualization of
space, which is inversely related to the distance from the sacred being and its abode, its symbols, or
its representations. Therefore, he concluded that these fundamental concepts—time and space—
which are necessary for thinking, are socially derived. These Durkheimian ideas load Kant’s
perceptions of “time” and “space” with actual social content. Rather than being “a-priori” and
imperatives of thought, Durkheim concluded, time and space are specific and socially constructed;
their content is neither universal nor “externally” given. Rather, their content is social (Durkheim
1976, 13–15).
Hence, Durkheim maintained that a group’s “magic,” “holy,” “technology,” “science,” or
“beauty” and its specific kind of world “knowledge” related to these realms is embedded in the
group’s religion. However, religion is not only socially constructed but it also constitutes the faithful.
After all, perceptions, knowledge, and science are rooted in language and symbols, in names and
tools that individuals employ in defining themselves and “their” world. In short, religion is immersed
in material and ideational culture preceding, constituting, and outliving each one of its bearers.
Though each society has its own “god,” there are no false gods. Each religion has its own
logic and, therefore, it is not only “true” to its members, but it also creates the moral and material
structure that transforms, through well-orchestrated rituals, uninitiated individuals into full-fledged
group members. As a result, members become “knowledgeable” and intellectually committed as well
as emotionally invested with that specific mode of understanding, moral and aesthetic orders and their
demands.
Group members can hardly “see” the world differently from the way in which their group had
taught them to understand it. Seeing, experiencing, and thinking are socially constructed. People are
made in the image and through the symbolic and material tools their society provided and instilled in
them. Such initiation and recurring participation inculcates and arouses tremendous emotional
associative structures of the mind and attachments of the heart (Hammond 1983). This emotive bond
serves as the ground on which understanding of self and the world is created.
Hence, this ritualistic emotional solidarity of hearts and collective sentiments give group’s
members not only a way of understanding (logic and interpretation) and doing things (know-how) in
the world, but also a name (subjectivity) in the world. This “education” provides its “students” a way
of feeling, perceiving, and interpreting themselves and the world. The combined effect of these
embedded processes of knowledge and subjectivity creation—rooted in social rituals—furnishes not
only know-how (technology) and explanations of the social world around (philosophy), but also their
group solidarity. In short, the group’s reason and personal thinking is immersed in the group’s
emotions. Therefore, according to Durkheim cultural relativism should be seen as a “social fact”
rather than an intellectual stance.
 Moreover, these emotionally based like-mindedness and emergent solidarities are social
engines for group power. Group solidarity establishes what people perceive as “their” way of life.
Excluding “others” from these intimate circles serves the purpose of building the group’s power as
well as articulating and polishing its identity, its understandings, and the role it assigns to “enemies”
and “outsiders.”
Abrogation of the group’s way of life causes bursts of righteous anger, resentment, and calls
for action. In other words, group solidarity creates a moral and esthetic order in which the group
members’ common ideas about “reality” are transformed into inalienable rights, identity titles, and
esthetic judgments. Demotion, derogation, or abrogation of these common and inalienable rights is
considered harmful to the self as well as to the group identity and, no less important, to its standards
of thinking and judgment. Such assaults demand retaliation; they compel action. And, people commit
themselves to act upon restoration of these aesthetic judgments, rights, titles, identity, and claims as
exclusionary mechanisms. Group membership and solidarity are rooted in emotions and are
manifested in feelings, in the methods of reality measuring and evaluating. Clearly, calculated actions
such as group commitment and loyalty’s explanation are rooted in emotional, that is, irrational
fundamentals.
Rituals and social gathering create, transmit, and augment group solidarity and power; when
group solidarity is established, it demands sacrifice and the overcoming of self-interest from its
individual members. It creates strong emotional ties as well as formal foundations for devotion. In
short, it creates a social entity that demands homogeneity; it compels and rewards actions and
interpretations of the world in accordance with the group’s emotional and calculable judgments,
knowledge, morals, esthetics, and interests. Claims for exclusiveness and uniqueness are rooted in
the politics of distinction and exclusion. Such group identity tendentiousness seems to be not only
“logical” but also emotionally rewarding to the group’s members.
Group identity as a social entity demands obedience, control, and devotion from insiders, and
it presents an independent and indifferent force to outsiders. This is not only the essential definition
of power but also the ground on which exclusion is erected. Social groups’ power is present in the
groups’ rules, emotions, and logic of action; it is held in the minds and done with the hands of its
members, intellectual leaders, and political rulers. “My group, right or wrong” makes much political,
intellectual, and emotional sense because it has a direct bearing on individual members’ behavior.  
In modernity, the “nation” and the “nation-state” were the two theaters in which this emotional
gestalt received dramatic expressions through the politics of exclusion. Such politics were manifested
either as racializing “others” or casting them into a state of not belonging and into a status of refugees.
Obviously, such general group processes are older than any formal, modern “contract” codification
of group relations into either a “contract” and “state” or a “nation”; however, such processes received
tremendous acuteness and urgency in modernity. Modernization of the nation meant the
demodernization of those who could not assimilate or would not be accepted as insiders by the
nation’s members (Bauman 1989).

Nonobvious Sociology and Nationalistic Precontractual Group Relations

The first step in adequately addressing the tension between modernization and demodernization in
general, and the conflict between human rights and national self-determination and citizenship in
particular, is to consider the historical and intellectual concurrent emergence of “contract theories”
and “theories of the nation.”
Contract theories and theories of the nation appeared roughly at the same intellectual era—
modernity. This coappearance is not accidental. They were “officially” born from similar political
events—the American and mainly the French Revolution. As Brubaker avers, “The Revolution, in
short, invented not only the nation-state but the modern institution and ideology of national
citizenship” (Brubaker 1989, 32). Moreover, it seems that this coincidence also indicates the tension
between modern political philosophies, the history of modern political action, and their manifold
relations to Enlightenment thought (Wokler 2000). My inference that group membership and
solidarity precedes contract relations complicates the simplistic, straightforward association between
Enlightenment political philosophy and the politics of national self-determination and awakening.
As mentioned earlier, group membership is rooted in the emotional embrace of the group’s
representations and logic. This premise starkly confronts the contractual rationale of the group’s
origin. It also challenges not only the notion of rational society creation but also the presumed
antiquity of nations. That is to say, the emotional group membership theory not only opposes
assumptions coupled in the—hypothesized or imagined—notion of the “state of nature” but it is also
a critique of the idea that nations and nations-states are pristine historical creatures. Even as a
hypothetical construct, the “state of nature” hypothesis is remarkably limited; it is clearly a fantastic
historical description (Nbete 2012; Mills 1997; Pateman 1988). Moreover, and in addition, the nation-
state is a modern invention (Anderson 1991; Hobsbawm 1983; Gellner 2006).
The “state of nature” hypothesis is neither helpful nor very productive in addressing the
nation-state self-determination or human rights complexes. Moreover, morality is neither invented
nor can be justified by a pristine contract. Indeed, morality is neither constituted nor invented by the
contractual intellectual perception; it is codified. This is so not because morality is preordained
(Kant). Rather, morality is socially created; however, and more importantly, sociability, which is a
condition of morality, preexisted the emergence of contract, hypothesized or imagined. Neither
perfect freedom and absolute equality (Hobbes) nor moral personhood (Kant) as preexisting general
conditions in the “state of nature” are helpful premises. Social conventions preceded contractual
agreements since human beings’ survival depended on membership in pristine cultural–religious
groups.
Pateman’s and Mills’ arguments in The Sexual Contract and in The Racial Contract,
respectively, argue exactly that. Namely, that the “State of Nature” or the asocial state of “war of all
against all” cannot be assumed to be a socially free or pristine existential condition; neither can the
“state of nature” be seen as “original position” (Rawlsian) theoretical or actual state of being.
Precontractual relations defined contract relations. Pateman and Mills are in agreement with the
aforementioned Durkheimian argument concerning the antiquity and longevity of precontractual
relations and, more generally, with the nonobvious claim of the irrational aspect of rational thought.
In addition, I argue that the precontractual nature of social contracts is indirectly confirmed by the
historical development of claims for national self-determination and sovereignty. This is especially
apparent in nationalist declared and incessant war on the citizenship rights of state citizens. As a
historical rule, national self-determination rights trumped citizen rights.
In fact, the establishment of nation-states did not grant equality freedom rights and personhood
to the citizens of the state but enshrined equality, freedom rights, and personhood to the members of
nations even in their most diluted form as “We the People” of the American Constitution. That is to
say, the social contractarian approach legitimized a specified group’s identity and solidarity in the
name of universality and impartiality; this is obviously true for males in the case of Pateman (1988)
and for whites in the case of Mills (1997). However, this is also true in terms of the claim for national
rights. Hence, respect, equality, and freedom are bestowed only to the nation’s members and even
then, it is or used to be gender differentiated. Such equality and freedoms are built on a preexisting
emotional commitment to the “clan’s totem,” so to speak, and allowing for modern variations, not to
formal or synthetic perceptions of the state’s citizens.
As aforesaid, those precontractual relations are emotionally loaded. Group membership is a
long-standing social institution; it is rooted in emotions and defines specific truth claims. It preceded
contract membership. Therefore, the constant and consistent tension between national membership
and state citizenship should be understood in this context. The main reason being that these two
crucial associations—nation and state—draw their inspiration from different emotional, logical, and
historical sources. While the nation is immersed in emotional demands, the state is completely formal,
legal, and civic–political. Establishing this distinction enables a discussion of the nonobvious origin
of citizenship and Weber’s occidental theory of citizenship.

The nonobvious Roots of Citizenship

Like-mindedness is the basis of group members’ trust; they distrust others as a result of their divergent
opinions and behaviors. Their “opinions” are taken for granted as a form of life and as their vested
interests. Other groups’ opinions are perceived as threats. Therefore, social conflicts emerge, among
other things, from this difference between ways of life, expressed as different groups’ “opinion”
(Festinger 1954). In short, the group’s way of life—which is nothing but the form in which the group
does, judges, evaluates, and names things—becomes the group’s vested interest. It becomes its
“inalienable right” and tends to be formally articulated or narrated in the group’s constituting acts
and forms of religions. Only on this basis can one establish the rule of reason. Reason is
preconditioned by the emotions that sustain its operation.
Hence, social contracts are rooted in this trust-creating process. It is an emotional
precontractual basis from which reason and the notion of contract might emerge. One becomes a
member of a specific universe in which some obligations hold as far as he or she takes part in that
precontractual emotional bond. These moral bonds are the social forces or—to use a Durkheimian
metaphor—the “ropes” that hold that society together. One has trust in others who are like him or
her, because they adhere to the same moral regulations, moral obligations, and ethical “oughts” of
self and other. They constitute a specific “universe of obligation” usually expressed in religious terms.
In Imperial Crime and Punishment, Helen Fein portrays the universe of obligations as “The
common conscience is then limited to one’s own kind, members of one’s own class, excluding the
other class from the universe obligation—the range of persons and groups toward whom basic rules
or ‘oughts’ are binding” (1977, 7, 17, italics added).
How was the highly celebrated modern occidental universe of obligation politically defined?
Though this discussion might seem to be a detour, I find it essential to the explanation of nationalistic
human rights abuse and exclusion of others from a group’s “universe of obligation.” Such a
theoretical investigation involves Weber’s occidental citizenship theory. Rather than looking for
citizenship’s roots and logic in a hypothesized or presumed “state of nature,” nonobvious sociology
tremendously benefits from engaging Weber’s occidental citizenship theory.
Weber argued that citizenship’s cultural roots should be sought in religion and its
phenomenology in the occidental city (Weber 1961, 233–249; Weber 1946, 269, 403–404, see also
Weber 1952, 421–422; and, Weber 1958, 37–38). “The city of the Occident,” he argued, “unique
among all other cities in the world—and citizenship, in the sense in which it has emerged only in the
Occident—has been the major theatre for Christianity” (Weber 1946, 269).
Christianity, according to Weber, has been urban and civic. However, he relates Christianity’s
pivotal role in the emergence of citizenship to long historical developments within Jewish theodicy
and history. The emergence of citizenship is especially intertwined with the Jewish monotheistic
logic, which was transferred to Christianity by the early Christian Jews. Weber says, “Judaism had
through them (James and the elders MA) feathered the bed for the Christian mission” (1952, 422).
Within this historical and theological Judaic process, Weber assigned crucial importance to two
aspects. The first is what he called the God of the Israelite confederacy (the Israelites clans’
confederacy) manifested in the covenant (B’rith or Berith) (Bellah 1997, 14) 3 and the second is the
war on magic unleashed by the Jewish priesthood of the Levites and prophets.
The break away from ancestral worship—what Robert N. Bellah calls the clash and conflict
between kinship and religion codified not invented 4—and the creation of a god for political
agreements among various clans, though not ancient Judaism’s invention, received a significant
content in the case of the Israelite confederacy. “Weber,” argued Fahey Tony, “thus regarded the
covenant as primarily a sociopolitical instrument for the maintenance of the external boundaries and
internal structure of the confederacy” (Fahey 1982, 66). The Jewish god was a god of a political
confederacy of clans. It united the clans for political, mainly defensive, purposes.
This political agreement had two significant characteristics. First, religious rituals consecrated
it and it received the blessing of an authority higher than any clan’s god. Second, the union was
constituted on a covenant (Berith) between the people at large and the confederacy’s god. The
agreement was civic in nature, and its god was a civic god. God and the people were the two sides of
these unique contractual relations. “As Yahwe by berith was the contractual partner to the ritualistic
and social order of the confederacy, Yahwe’s reason for treating others as inferior depended simply
on the fact that they didn’t know his will or abide by his commandments” (Weber 1952, 120). The
“covenant” idea became a distinguishing trait of the relations between Israelites and their god (ibid).
Hence, membership in the confederacy and loyalty to its religious law were determined by
adherence to the Law or compliance with rules (civic ethics) of the political agreement (Fahey 1982,
67). A tradition of scholars (Levite priests and prophets) interpreting and educating the letter and
spirit of the law has emerged. Since magic was considered a way to bypass the “Law” and to influence
God’s decisions, a war against magic became the hallmark of a whole Jewish learned strata and the
central message of the Jewish prophets. The civic—political—nature of this religion was established.
It was rooted in a political agreement between God and its people.

3
 Bellah says, “The notion that the covenant, which is the foundation of ancient Israel, formed a revolutionary
confederation of marginal people in conflict with Canaanite city states has gained considerable currency” (14).
4
Bellah: “But the clash between religion and kinship differs from that with all the other spheres: kinship is not simply
rejected; it is transformed and universalized so that it becomes the very principle of religion itself in the form of world-
denying love” (see the full discussion on pages 5–9, the quote is taken from page 8).
 Whereas Hinduism and Taoism developed mysticism; Judaism veered toward rationalism.
Hinduism and Taoism spread magic; Judaism divested the world of it. Hence, Judaism provided the
basis for a rational attitude as a by-product of the political and universal (monotheistic) nature of its
God. It demystified and democratized God’s grace and made it available and understandable to every
member of the confederacy. It equalized the religious status of believers as a method to achieve God’s
grace. Paraphrasing Weber’s words, it transformed members into subjects, not objects of religiosity
(1946, 269).
However, according to Weber, this rational and educational attitude—focused as it was on
fighting any “particularism of grace” and for achieving the equalization of believers’ religious
“musicality” (1946, 287)—was restricted, or better blocked, by the Jewish dual morality of insider
versus outsider. This bifurcated morality, according to Weber, constituted the Judaic distinction
between “we are God’s chosen people” and “others”5.
According to Weber, only the Pauline breakthrough6 enabled the universalization of Judaism’s
message. That is, the propagation of Christianity on a world scale. It did so by transforming the
world’s population into God’s potential chosen people. The exclusiveness of the Jewish “chosen
people” premise restricted the universalization of the message of the Judaic God. In order to break
these ghetto walls, Paul (the Apostle) had to destroy the ethnic restriction, the dietary laws, and the
ritual separateness of Jewish religiosity. Only then did he achieve “Christian freedom.” Hence, the
universalization of Christianity on the one hand, and the emergence of occidental citizenship—though
1,000 years apart—on the other, were made possible only with the transcendence of Judaism. The
democratization of God’s grace was the theoretical foundation on which Weber built his theory of
occidental citizenship (1946, 403–404, see also 1952, 421–422; 1958, 37–38, See especially 1961,
263). The religious, emotional, and irrational root of occidental citizenship is a significant point in
my argument here; however, the formal, civic, and the law-like aspect of citizenship is also crucial.
Both should be borne in mind.
According to Weber, citizenship is a Western phenomenon that was most unlikely or almost
impossible to occur in setting which did not have these cultural and religious foundations. The
teachability and understandability of the law pulled the emotional rug from underneath the claim for
religious virtuosity of magicians and of magic, what Weber called “particularism of grace” (1946,
287).
Weber also argues that variations in the types of prophets and images of god provide different
ground for status stratification. Ancient India is a conspicuous case in this regard. In Hinduism, not

5
 Weber defined the Jewish group as a sociocultural entity either as “Guest People” or as “Pariah People.” Weber
argued “All the essential traits of Jewry’s attitude toward the environment can be deduced from this pariah existence-
especially its voluntary ghetto, long anteceding compulsory internment, and the dualistic nature of its in-group and out-
group morality” (1952, 3) (For a more elaborate consideration see Amor 1999).
6
Weber says: “For the Christians, it meant the origin of Christian ‘freedom,’ which Paul again and again celebrated
triumphantly; for this freedom meant the universalism of Paul’s mission, which cut across nations and status groups.
The elimination of all ritual barriers of birth for the community of the eucharists, as realized in Antioch, was, in
connection with the religious preconditions, the hour of conception for the Occidental ‘citizenry.’ This is the case even
though its birth occurred more than a thousand years later in the revolutionary conjurations of the medieval cities. For
without commensalism—in Christian terms, without the Lord’s Supper in common—no oath-bound fraternity and no
medieval urban citizenry would have been possible” (1946, 403–404 see also 269). See also the discussion in Ancient
Judaism 1952 pp. 421–424.
everyone is “religiously musical” (1946, 287). Those who are not, have to emulate the “religious
virtuoso.” “Heroic” or “virtuoso” religiosity is opposed to mass religiosity. “By ‘mass,’” says Weber,
“we understand those who are religiously ‘unmusical’” (1946, 287). However, when God’s
imperatives concerning rules of everyday behavior are pronounced by the emissary prophet in
teachable and understandable forms, the religious experience is “democratized.” Religion is
transformed into a plebeian salvation religion in contrast to the aristocratic salvation religions of the
East.
Demystification of religious “musicality” democratized God’s grace because equalization of
believers’ status was a religious premise and point of departure. This was a direct result of the oath-
bound relations between believers and their God. These aspects were introduced by monotheistic
religions in general. Believers’ status equalization was an organic element of the religious argument,
and status equalization became a social consequence or an effect created by religious teaching and
observation of the religious Law.
Hence, in citizenship, maybe more than in any other cultural trait of the Occident, the
influence and power of the monotheistic approach is apparent. Monotheistic religiosity inadvertently
contributed to the creation of a secular and rational institution: citizenship. Status equalization as the
democratization of God’s grace confirmed Weber’s well-known observation on the unintended
consequences of purposeful action and also provided the sociological foundations to his occidental
citizenship theory.
A Weberian sociology of religion treats citizenship as a political concept that represents one
more aspect of the trajectory in which the development of Protestantism diverged from that of
Judaism. Such sociology neither condones nor condemns; however, it aspires to examine
consequences and possible outcomes. The concept of citizenship is constituted on adherence to the
rule of law; a law that human beings have created as an abiding and final arbitrator. As a paradoxical
development and consequence, the radical political secularization of the world restricts God’s spheres
of authority. The dualistic nature of the religious world in which heaven is the prerogative of god and
earth is the domain of human activity is gradually transformed into a monistic and immanent one.
Christianity in general, and Protestantism in particular, initiated such radical secularization of the
world. A dualistic world governed by god from above and inhabited by human beings bellow was
incompatible with such political secularization. This is a variation on the prevalent Enlightenment
theme of a world without god (Schluchter 1988, 252–254, 265–268).
Protestantism inadvertently but progressively developed an immanent conception of the
world. World’s affairs are humans’ responsibility. Humans must strive “…to create the Kingdom of
God on earth” (Kalberg 1994, 98–100). Nevertheless, the privilege of final judgement—unknowable
and incomprehensible—remains god’s prerogative. In other words, it is a world that retains a tenuous
touch with an almighty god. By contrast, in the Jewish faith, religious revolutions—or miracles—are
circumscribed by god’s actions and interventions in the world. Hence, it is intrinsically tied up to a
dual conception of the world.
History, in the Protestant conception, becomes the prerogative of human beings. This is the
religious basis of Protestant rationalism and civic participation. This is its “iron logic”; a logic that
relentlessly spurred Protestants to a radical secularization of the world through dominating and
shaping its history. Paraphrasing Weber again, religiosity transformed believers into subjects in
history not objects of religiosity (1946, 269). Religious status equalization rooted in faith’s
teachability and understandability and in a specific individual contractual relation to a personified
god had the unintended consequences of citizenship as a civic burden and instrumentality as a political
practice.

The nonObvious Nature of Human Rights

The late European historian Eric Hobsbawm argued, “…that the last two centuries of human history
of planet Earth are incomprehensible without some understanding of the term ‘nation’ and the
vocabulary derived from it” (1992, 1).
Charles Talyor (1996) echoes Hobsbawm’s claim regarding the modernity and ubiquity of
nations and nation-states. Conversing with Ernest Renan’s idea that the nation is a “daily plebiscite,”
Taylor adds that it is also true that the nation is a modern entity, based on “political will,” and
therefore belongs to the era of popular national self-determination and sovereignty claims. He
concludes that the nation is a modern union of wills.
However, there is also an ironic paradox. In spite of the “nation” representing a
contemporaneous political will, such or similar will existed already in the past. Indeed, group
membership existed without materializing into nation-states or manifesting itself in the demand for a
nation-state creation. Obviously, group membership loyalty’s assertion exhibits similar kinds of
emotions not fully compatible with the nations’ claim to novelty.
Nevertheless, nations and nation-states are, indeed, modern political creatures. National
ideologues display unique aspects and approaches to history, to the present, and to the law, aspects
that are absent from previous loyalty collective claims. These characteristics set nations apart from
earlier versions of group memberships. The specific way nationalist ideology treats history
exemplifies these unique attitudes.
For nationalists, the nation’s forgotten history is as significant as its remembered history.
Ernest Renan articulated these insights in his seminal lecture in 1882. He argued, “Now it is the
essence of a nation that all individuals have a great deal in common and also that they have forgotten
a great deal” (Renan 1996 [1882], 21). Clearly, nationalist history is a politicized history.
Nationalists’ ideologues know that in order to transform their audiences into ardent nationalists, some
facts about their nation’s history must be wilfully and intentionally forgotten; to wilfully forget is, in
itself, an oxymoron. Likewise, remembered historical events are commemorated, sanctified, and
glorified. This is an important characteristic of nationalistic identity and ideology. Plainly,
remembered or forgotten histories entail different lines of politics and ideology.
However, “the nation’s” relations to the present are as complicated. By definition, the
nationality principle recognizes the existence of other nations, nationalists, and nationalities. In
addition, “other” nations must be assumed to exist on equal ground. The nationality principle
implicitly assumes that for any single nation’s right to exist and to self-determine and assert its
sovereignty, the world must be composed of many other such sovereign nations. Otherwise,
nationalists’ claims are nonsensical. Accepting nations’ plurality, equality, and relational nature to
others means that the world is cohabitated by human beings grouped into equal-standing nations.
Cohabitation—or group’s plurality—is a human condition. It is a social imperative. It is a political
given, and it is also a sociological reality (Arendt 1973; Butler 2011, 83; Parekh 2004). There is no
way out of the fundamental reality of cohabitation and plurality. National feeling like group
membership always crystalizes against the existence of other nations or groups. Nationalism, by
definition, is relational.
Last, “nations in states” also explicitly mean “citizens of states.” That is to say, members of
other nations living within the state according to the law. The newness of the nation is manifested in
its political relations to the state and, especially, in its relations to the state’s citizens and to the laws
governing the state. Hence, the “nation-state” is the theater in which all these conflicting relations are
manifested and materialized.
Moreover, the constitutive abstract principle of national ideology claims that the political
(state) and the national (nation) units should be congruent in order to form a peaceful nation-state
(Gellner 1983, 1). Obviously, full correspondence between “nation” and “state” rarely—or never—
occurs in history. More often, the political frame (the state of the nation) includes “strangers”—who
belong to “other” nations, ethnicities, economic strata, and religious and political groups—as citizens.
Additionally, and frequently, not all “nationals” reside in the nation’s “state.” Likewise, since “pure”
or “pristine” nations are narrated ideologically rather than experienced historically, this tension tends
to produce atrocities against nonnational citizens. These atrocities are the lived-through experiences
of states’ citizens in nation-states, especially for those who become or are forcibly transformed into
refugees.
Similarly, while states were either imposed by force and/or by the dictates of the division of
labor, nations require willed political drive and an explicit recognition of a common cultural bond
uniting their members and constituting their identity. “In other words,” says Gellner, “nations maketh
man; nations are the artefacts (sic) of men’s convictions and loyalties and solidarities” (italics in the
original, Gellner 1983, 7). Nations are created by nationalists, not the other way around. A “mere
category of persons” is transformed into a nation by the willed and accepted recognition of the binding
rights and duties that national membership imposes on them (ibid). The recognition of the “rights and
duties” that bind a mere category of people into a “nation” encompasses what Benedict Anderson has
called “Imagined Communities” (Anderson 1991, 5–7, 144–150). Nations are consequences of
imagined communities’ will.
However, historically speaking, states preceded nations. A brief historical review of the
Habsburg, the Ottoman and the Russian Empires in the nineteenth century, to provide just a few
recent and well-known examples, establishes the veracity of this assertion. While multinational states
such as these empires were able to protect their diverse residing populations, albeit to limited degree
and inconsistently, nation-states’ failures to protect their citizens is a common occurrence. However,
this failure is neither an invariable nor an inevitable historical fact.
In many historical instances, it was the national state that victimized its citizens (Rummel
1994). The assumed rational nature of the civic contract on which the nation-state is constituted is
being constantly questioned historically. It has been questioned by a plethora of personal complaints,
public troubles, and group grievances involving abuses of citizenship rights by nationalistic regimes.
The supposed contractual principle would lead us to believe that citizenship, as a formal status, should
have provided a solid protecting shield to citizens. In many cases, this was historically fictitious.
Indeed, the nation-state’s operational mode should be suspected as ominous, threatening, and vicious
as far as state citizens are concerned.
Evidently, national membership in nations and citizenship in states are responsive to and
inscribed by different political meanings. In many such historical instances, these divergent meanings
confront and pit the nation against the state, resulting in acrimonious, frequently bloody, and
murderous relations toward the state’s citizens.
That is to say, the differences between the operational modes of “nations” and “states” point
to potential contradictions and conflicts. In many historical instances the “nation’s sons and
daughters” have excluded the “state’s citizens.” This exclusion and opposition manifested itself in
competitive struggles over resources (land, capital, power, knowledge, and status) and over the
defining content of the “nation” vis-à-vis the “state” and the “nation-state.” State’s citizens are
excluded from the universe of the nation-state’s obligation (Fein 1977). These exclusionary measures
and methods included cultural as well as racialized definitions of national citizenship. In some
instances, genocidal means were used to achieve the coveted “national purity.” Usually, this conflict
resulted in the transformation of the state’s citizens into refugees.
In short, such nation-states failed to protect their citizens in the name of national
belongingness. In many such cases, the nation-state was the victimizer in the name of the nation. The
annals of the last two centuries—which Hobsbawm refers to (1992) and Rummel demonstrates
(1994)—are full of such mass victimizations demonstrating the dark side of democracy and the
violent side of demodernization (Amor 1999; Mann 2005; Powel 2011). These abundant attestations
constitute ample and convincing testimonies of the failure of nation-states’ to protect their citizens.
The nation-state demodernized these singled-out citizens of the state. It excluded them out of the
protective orbit of the modern state’s law, in the name of the nation.
Hence, the irrational source of rationality and the emotional bond from which social groups
are made (literally and metaphorically) bring us to the threshold of a modern crisis. Maybe it is the
modern crisis. The crisis can be crudely summarized into the struggle between nation and state.
This struggle has three aspects: first are the questions regarding national belongingness,
second is the meaning and scope of civic participation, and third is the challenge of cohabitation in a
world defined by plural cultural ways of life. That is to say, what is the content and scope of state
protection of citizenship rights in societies in which people of different “gods” and moral–cultural
orders come to coexist and cohabit?

Conclusion: Demodernization as Human Rights Abuse

The modern crisis is, in fact, the nation-state’s content list of human rights abuses. It is the failure to
withstand the realization that “national belongingness” is everything but clear or obvious, that we
cohabit the world with others—others who have different universes of obligations and who are
citizens of our states. Cohabitation with others means a plurality of universes of obligation. However,
it is realized time and again that the operating principle of “the nation” within the “nation-state”
cannot epistemologically embrace the ontological reality of people’s and gods’ plurality cohabiting
in the world.
Hence, the notion of “the modern crisis” can be defended in a double manner. First, there is a
huge amount of empirical evidence that establishes nation-states as the main culprits in violating their
own citizens’ human rights. For example, modern genocides were state-sanctioned legitimized
violation of citizens’ human rights. Violence was perpetrated against those who were excluded from
the nation-state’s “universe of obligation” (Amor 1999; Bauman 2000; Fein 1977; Mann 2005;
Powell 2011; Rummel 1994).
 Second, the echoes of this crisis are also being heard in less dramatic historical events; they
are voiced by poor people, women’s groups, racial minority and national groups, indigenous people,
immigrants, and people with sexual orientations that differ from the accepted and legitimized
heterosexual manner and symbols. It seems that our modern rational creations—nation-states and
citizenship regimes—are accused of perpetrating the gravest violence against portions of their own
citizens.
However, genocide cannot and should not be equated with national or minority discrimination
and oppression. Racialized and oppressed minorities complain of abuse, misrecognition, and
violation of their human rights. This modern crisis is taking place between ethnos practices of
membership in nation-states and demos needs for recognition in states. On their path to modernization
nations demodernize their state citizens; they transform them into refugees or perpetual minorities of
one kind or another.
It is becoming obvious that the state’s citizens are not protected unless they are members of a
nation. Citizens are racialized and, then, are made into refugees. Refugees are state citizens who were
denationalized and denaturalized from their previous national belonging. Refugees are thrown into
an existential void. There is no legitimate authority or institution that can or is interested in protecting
refugees. They become part of a modern insoluble refugee problem. This is so because there are no
territories that such refugees can claim as an accepted and recognized homeland of their nation
(Agamben 1995; Arendt 1994 [1943]). They can be naturalized only in a new nationalized
environment. Naturalization and nationalization can be effected only on a personal basis and
bestowed thanks to a foreign government’s goodwill.
Our rational creations—states and citizenship regimes—are positioned under internal and
external crossfire. States and citizenship regimes need to simultaneously develop a system that
recognizes difference (distinction) and universality (equality). This is the epitome of the modern
crisis; the state, which is the tool supposedly capable of addressing modern built-in citizens’
problems, is controlled by the nation that is preferential and differential in its treatment. The nation-
state privileges national members’ entitlements over state citizens’ rights.
While it seems that Helen Fein argues that there should be an effort to establish a universe of
obligation that will include everybody, Hannah Arendt is skeptical of such eventuality or “world
government.” Arendt argues that there is no chance to find such a measure within a world system of
nation-states. She suggests that the similarity in the human condition is the only ground from which
political cooperation between equal human beings as equals can emerge. However, in order to
cooperate politically, human beings must be eligible, equal, and allowed to participate. That is, they
must be recognized as the political members of communities and citizens of the state (or a world
society).
Yet, this political recognition is denied—for various reasons in different settings—to some.
In the absence of a receiving “nation,” and in a world premised on the exclusive existence of nation-
states, the denial of the political status of the state’s citizenship exiles the excluded into the territory
of stateless, homeless, and rightless existence. Such people become—literally and metaphorically—
permanent refugees in a world that has no refuge or sanctuary for them. They literally become the
“scum of the earth” (Arendt 1977, 267; Parekh 2004, 42).
These stateless, homeless, rightless refugees are forced into an existential void. They are
thrown into an existence in which their actions do not matter and their opinions are not relevant to
anything; that is, they do not have the right to have rights either as access to action that matters or to
opinion that is relevant. Action that matters and relevant opinion can be materialized only within a
community of equals committed to guarantee that equality. Refugees are left only with human rights
as their shield and protection, and this amounts to little. Arendt says,

This extremity, and nothing else, is the situation of people deprived of human rights. They are
deprived, not of the right to freedom, but of the right to action; not of the right to think
whatever they please, but of the right to opinion. Privileges in some cases, injustices in most,
blessings and doom are meted out to them according to accident and without any relations
whatsoever to what they do, did, or may do. We become aware of the existence of a right to
have rights (and that means to live in a framework where one is judged by one’s actions and
opinions) and a right to belong to some kind of organized community, only when millions of
people emerged who had lost and could not regain these rights because of the new global
political situation. The trouble is that this calamity arose not from any lack of civilization,
backwardness, or mere tyranny, but, on the contrary, that it could not be repaired, because
there was no longer any “uncivilized” spot on earth, because whether we like it or not we have
really started to live in One World. Only with a completely organized humanity could the loss
of home and political status become identical with expulsion from humanity altogether. (1979,
296–297)

However, modernity suggests that there is no transcending rule according to which this
refugee crisis as a form of demodernization can be regulated. This politically and sociologically
entangled human condition is further complicated by the fact that neither religion nor science can
assist addressing its severity; we are living in a political world that lost its transcendental qualities
and has no terrestrial means to address its self-created horrors (Schluchter 1988, 254–264) other than
human cooperation and politics.
One can neither aspire to rescue humanity by a universal religion nor hope to redeem it by
insights derived from science. The world is immanent (Arendt 1979, 297, Parekh 2004, 2008).
Theologically speaking this world order is a soteriology (theology of salvation) without eschatology
(doctrines about death and its aftermath). If “salvation” is to occur, it must be within an immanent
world and must rely on human action. It must be a soteriology rooted in and manufactured by human
action in a world devoid of the presence of god. Within the extant political structure of nation-states,
this seems to be an insurmountable modern crisis. It is a world system that is programed, by definition,
to demodernize parts of its population.
Arendt goes beyond the naiveté of human rights’ hopeless idealism. Human rights must be
grounded in something stronger than idealistic legality. Obviously, human rights depend on political
institutions. However, politics is not the realm of truth. Politics according to Arendt is nuanced,
situational, and tragic (Isaac 2002, 531). Therefore, politics is the realm of plurality, antagonism,
compromise, and agreement. Human rights are contingent on politics. It is an ongoing struggle, never
fully achieved. It is an imperfect struggle. Isaac presents it as in-eliminable paradox. Plurality is the
human condition. It means that equality and difference (distinction) must coexist and always
simultaneously. Human rights must be protected from within this paradoxical situation, and it can be
protected by this very condition of never arriving but always trying to protect humans’ rights to action
and opinion in communities by humans’ actions combating demodernization.
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