Human rights were from the start subordinated to national self-determination.

Evidence

In other words, man had hardly appeared as a completely emancipated, completely isolated being who carried his dignity within himself without reference to some larger encompassing order, when he disappeared again into a member of a people. From the beginning the paradox involved in the declaration of inalienable human rights was that it reckoned with an “abstract” human being who seemed to exist nowhere, for even savages lived in some kind of a social order. If a tribal or other “backward” community did not enjoy human rights, it was obviously because as a whole it had not yet reached that stage of civilization, the stage of popular and national sovereignty, but was oppressed by foreign or native despots. The whole question of human rights, therefore, was quickly and inextricably blended with the question of national emancipation; only the emancipated sovereignty of the people, of one’s own people, seemed to be able to insure them. As mankind, since the French Revolution, was conceived in the image of a family of nations, it gradually became self-evident that the people, and not the individual, was the image of man. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 708

Categorization

• XREF: Directly prefigures the Islamophobia-field argument that the nation-state framework subordinates minority rights to majority national sovereignty — connects to the construction of the ‘Other’ within the imagined community.
• DEFINE: Clarifies the foundational paradox of the Rights of Man: abstract human being vs. member of a people.