Why Human Rights Depend on the Nation State

A law professor defends civic nationalism.

(Photo by David Jensen/Getty Images.)

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Around the turn of the millennium, when talk of the end of history still carried the weight of common sense, I was a law student imagining a future in human rights. In a moment that captured the mood, I remember a trade law professor announcing that he never wanted to hear “the S-word”—sovereignty—spoken in his classroom. The subtext was clear: the nation-state was a relic of history to be left behind by the enlightened citizens of a rising global order. Looking back, the hubris is clear. Sovereignty hadn’t vanished, even if the Overton window on campus had closed. The professor had simply tried to conjure it offstage by force of will.

If sovereignty was unspeakable, nationalism was unforgivable. Among the educated classes, a whiff of genuine patriotism was treated as gauche—a lapse not just in judgment but in moral taste—something to be deflated with a knowing joke about “‘Murica.” That sensibility endures today. National pride sits at historic lows. Fewer than half of Gen Z Americans say they’re proud to be American. Many admit they’re even embarrassed by it.

I came of age inside that post-Cold War world, part of the vanguard of the era’s globalizing projects: free trade, economic liberalization, good governance, peacebuilding, transitional justice, and human rights. Trained at Harvard, I went on to help negotiate United Nations treaties at the State Department and to document atrocities for Human Rights Watch in West Africa before turning to academia to teach human rights law.

For much of that time, I believed in expanding the reach of international law. But from inside the machinery, I also watched where it stalled and where it overreached. Today, I see what should have been obvious to my younger self: the work of international human rights depends on the political communities it once hoped to transcend. Sovereignty and nationalism are not antagonists to the human rights project; they are its unacknowledged foundations.

Flash forward to the present, and the mindset that once treated sovereignty as suspect and nationalism as vaguely indecent hasn’t disappeared. Within the cosmopolitan strain of contemporary liberalism, the old reflexes persist: the recoil from nationalism, the suspicion of borders. And for most human rights professionals, rights are still imagined primarily as shields against the state. They are rarely understood as something that might depend on the strength of the state or the solidarity of its citizens. Yet solidarity is not a technocratic project that experts can engineer. It is a cultural accomplishment—the work of a nation rather than a government.

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The reflexive suspicion of nationalism isn’t baseless. The radical sense of belonging that can come with aggressive forms of nationalism has a dark side and can curdle into violence. This is the civics class consensus. The warning is practically baked into the curriculum. It is harder to see the downsides of the weak ties that often come with cosmopolitanism. For all its moral glamour, cosmopolitanism has always been a luxury belief—the creed of the well-traveled, well-credentialed, and well-heeled. It requires a certain degree of insulation from the vicissitudes of life to choose to belong nowhere. For many people without that luxury, the nation remains the largest form of belonging capable of sustaining the loyalty required to deliver social services, enforce laws, and preserve basic order.

I’ve worked in places where that basic order has collapsed. In parts of the Sahel where authority dissolves a few miles outside the capital, the fragility of the human rights project becomes unmistakable. Life without a functioning state isn’t a human rights paradise; it’s Hobbes made flesh. Of course, the state is both monster and midwife. It is the one force that can strangle rights and the only force that can uphold them. Too little power and a society drifts toward the chaos of Somalia; too much and it begins to resemble China. Most people, given the choice, will pick order.

But order alone doesn’t deliver rights. That depends on the character of the community behind the state—its sense of “we,” its willingness to restrain itself, its capacity to act together rather than fracture into tribes. That civic cohesion is the essence of nationhood, with a shared story and reciprocal obligations strong enough to hold a diverse democracy together. Without that civic “we,” human rights—like cosmopolitanism—float in midair. If anything, the human rights establishment is part of the problem. As human rights work professionalized, it drifted into a kind of bureaucratic cosmopolitanism—organized around donors and UN processes rather than a civic ground game in actual nations. Many NGOs sound more like policy consultancies than movements. A project meant to speak for people increasingly struggles to speak to them.

It did not have to unfold this way. The technocratic drift of international human rights institutions reflects a deeper imbalance within liberalism itself. The movement embraced liberalism’s idealism and universalist ambitions but neglected its countervailing virtues—prudence, respect for difference, and the dignity of communities governing themselves. But liberalism was never meant to be a creed of pure cosmopolitan abstraction. Its sturdier branches have always included self-determination and the recognition that human flourishing takes different forms in different places.

Somewhere along the line, the machinery of international norm production lost sight of those anchoring liberal virtues. What began as the modest, civilizational minimum of the 1948 Universal Declaration has grown into an intricate thicket of hundreds of treaty rights—rules drafted far from the publics expected to live under them. Human rights bodies now venture well beyond basic protections, telling states how the media should portray disability, how families should understand maternity, and even requiring governments to “ensure” that every person enjoys the benefits of scientific progress. Some directives are so sweeping and undefined that it is hard to say what compliance would look like. The effect has been to put the human rights project at odds with the very liberal goods it requires to endure: democratic consent and a shared sense of political authorship.

With this rights inflation, a crucial distinction has blurred. Rights exist to restrain majorities; legislatures exist to express them. When international bodies start turning policy preferences into “rights,” they stop defining a constitutional minimum and begin writing a global policy wish list. That is miles away from the Universal Declaration’s spare core of protections against torture, arbitrary detention, discrimination, and other basic assaults on dignity.

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What the moment requires is not another round of international invention but a change in posture—a liberalism that remembers its other half. Call it liberal localism: a recalibration that protects the essential floor of rights while recognizing that the work of building moral and political order happens closer to the ground. Rather than the assertive liberal internationalism of the 1990s—which presumed convergence—liberal localism accepts that different societies will pursue shared liberal goods through different institutional and cultural forms. It is less a retreat from universal principles than a recognition that liberal ends are most durable when reached through liberal means—persuasion, democratic authorship, and the slow work of consent in particular places.

But even if international law were pared back to its proper constitutional minimum, there remains a deeper problem: the limits of solidarity. Human beings are not wired for the limitless empathy imagined by the loftier versions of the human rights project. Robin Dunbar’s famous number—that an individual can handle roughly 150 stable relationships—captures the narrow radius of social life we evolved to manage. Anything larger depends on shared narratives that persuade strangers they share a common fate. The faith, the flag, and the institutions of common life are among such foundational stories. When those narratives weaken, the political imagination shrinks back to smaller forms of tribe.

Nationalism, for all its dangers, remains one of the few stories that can stretch across millions and still feel like home. Across much of the liberal world, loneliness and anxiety have surged even as prosperity has grown. The atomized individual, untethered from any deeper “we,” becomes easy prey for more combustible identities—conspiracies, crusades, and other forms of meaning without mercy. While “nationalism” is for many a tainted term that conjures only its blood-and-soil expressions, it comes in many varieties. There is also a civic or liberal nationalism, grounded not in ancestry but in shared laws, institutions, and commitments. It is the form that turns strangers into citizens and makes possible a pluralism that is generous but not unbounded, tolerant of difference without dissolving into a facile relativism.

This is no easy task in hyper-diverse societies where the communal glue has thinned. As Robert Putnam observed decades ago, diversity can reduce trust and social cooperation—real challenges for any democracy. A healthy civic nationalism could help, but only if we learn how to speak of national belonging without embarrassment and recover a moral vocabulary for why it matters.

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Re-enchanting a healthy civic nationalism does not require whitewashing history; it requires holding competing truths at once. Every national story contains darkness and light, cruelty and aspiration. But on parts of the contemporary left, the only permissible version is a negative one—a recitation of sins unsoftened by grace. Zinn and Chomsky were right that American history needs scrutiny, but they flattened the picture in the opposite direction, turning the national narrative into a running indictment. A nation cannot survive on confession and self-flagellation alone. A society that defines itself solely by its failures eventually loses not only its pride but its will to repair.

The irony is that this gloomier narrative persists even as millions of would-be immigrants risk their lives to reach the safe harbor of liberal democracy. People do not cross deserts and oceans for a country they consider wicked; they come because, for all its imperfections, liberal democracies remain among the freest and most humane places on earth. Yet the very conditions that make them attractive—openness, pluralism, mobility—also make cohesion harder to sustain. A shared sense of “we” amid rising immigration doesn’t emerge by default; it must be built through institutions that work, narratives that feel credible, and habits that bind strangers into citizens. It also means acknowledging what many avoid saying aloud: citizenship is more than an administrative technicality and cannot be extended without limit.

A renewed civic nationalism, grounded in self-determination and pluralism, allows that diversity to flourish without collapsing into either boundless relativism or smothering homogeneity. In contrast, the millennial vision of a world pressed into a single moral template would not be progress but a form of spiritual clear-cutting, a loss of the human variety on which genuine universality depends.

The path forward begins with two neglected virtues: civic belonging and moral modesty. The post–Cold War dream that the world could be governed from nowhere—by experts, courts, and NGOs—has run its course. Whatever we call this new multipolar world, the nation-state will play an increasingly prominent role. In this climate, the task will not be to transcend nations but to renew them—so that the language of rights, once again, has a home.

Dustin N. Sharp is a professor at the Kroc School of Peace Studies at the University of San Diego, where he writes on human rights, liberalism, and international politics. He is the author of Rethinking Transitional Justice for the Twenty-First Century.

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