How do societies balance individual and community rights?

Societies balance individual and community rights with laws. There are laws that are written for individual people and there are also laws that are written for communities and larger groups of people. Both are written with the main idea of providing services to the people as well as the communities. 

In the late fifteenth century, a major world power that established colonies in the era of old imperialism was france or germany or spain. their colonial activity was mainly limited to america or africa or asia.