Full Circle

This chapter completes the historical narrative by addressing the following puzzle: the modern state which developed through war-making and colonization is now seen to be necessary for interstate peace and the protection of human rights. To do so, the chapter begins with analyzing human rights appeals, like those of Eastern European dissidents, as challenges to state power. These challenges ultimately destabilized Eastern European states, but also pointed to alternatives to the state as best placed for achieving human rights. Logically and historically, the chapter suggests, the centralized state was not the obvious institutional solution to achieve human rights and development. But, in response to the humanitarian problems of the 1990’s, scholars and policymakers increasingly argued that centralized states were necessary for peace, human rights, and development, and advocated building states through foreign intervention. Such “state-building” is thus the opposite of the process of European state formation.