The Making of Minorities on Europe's Periphery

According to conventional views, minorities became an issue in world politics only after the establishment of nation-states in East-Central Europe in the aftermath of World War I. Nonetheless, most recent scholarship tends to question the extent to which empires can “think” like nation-states— that is, pursue national consolidation via standardization of its diverse populations.1 Those newly formed governments in the region, meanwhile, are more often conceptualized as, using Roger Brubaker’s definition, nationalizing states, essentially “ethnically heterogeneous [states] yet conceived as nation-states.”2 In this theoretical debate, the Soviet Union