ABSTRACT
While some observers view the modern state, particularly in the form in which it emerged in post-French Revolution Europe, as a political, bureaucratic organization designed to guarantee equal rights to all citizens, in the case of many modern states this is, in fact, often not the case. First, different states approach their own definition and define their own essence in a diverse, varied manner; state definition is itself a variable, not a constant, fixed or objective condition. Second, state definition is more often than not biased toward the dominant sociopolitical group within society, although in theory – that is, formally and officially – the state might guarantee the equality of all citizens. States vary substantially in terms of their own self-definition, and their self-definition has significant implications for interethnic relations, particularly in regard to the type and quality of democracy that they provide to their citizens. The granting of equal individual rights to all citizens has been at the very center of the modernization of the Western state. This process, while resulting in human equality on an individual level, has contained within itself the seeds of the tension between individual equality and group rights. This tension continues to impact many multiethnic states today. Individual equality, as a universal philosophy and as a regime type, is often inherently unfriendly toward the very notion of group rights. The notion of equality given to the world by the French Revolution, and through it to numerous European societies, was that of individual equality before the law within a unified national community but, at the same time, the negation of special rights or privileges for any group within society (and particularly any national or ethnic group).
