ABSTRACT
Any overview on the intricate relationship between human rights and ethnopolitics first has to give an exposition of the epistemological problems and ideological underpinnings in understanding the ‘meaning’ of these concepts. It goes without saying that the claim of universal human rights raised by the American Declaration of Independence in 1776 never mirrored social and political ‘reality’. To put it in a nutshell, the European history of state-formation and nation-building can be summarized in theory by two ‘ideal-types’ of the relationship of the concepts of ‘state’ and ‘nation’ – namely, the ‘French’ model of a ‘state-nation’ based on ‘cultural indifference’ and the ‘German’ model of the ‘nation-state’ by constructing ‘ethnic difference’ and ascribing political and legal significance to it.
