ABSTRACT
Ironically, many of the human rights principles that helped transform the dynastic state system into a true nation-state system, and that were invoked on behalf of the national independence movements that toppled the great European empires, are now playing havoc with the pluralistic world polity these principles helped to create. One of the lessons that President Woodrow Wilson and other liberals around the world drew from the terrible destruction of World War I was that the elemental tension between the rights of peoples and the rights of states could no longer be left to the balance-of-power mechanisms of the nation-state system to control. The most progress toward subjecting national governments to international standards of human rights has taken place among the twenty-one member states of the Council of Europe, all of whom are parties to the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms.
