What drives a state's choice to assimilate, accommodate or exclude ethnic groups within its territory? In this innovative work on the international politics of nation-building, Harris Mylonas argues that a state's nation-building policies toward non-core groups – individuals perceived as an ethnic group by the ruling elite of a state – are influenced by both its foreign policy goals and its relations with the external patrons of these groups. Through a detailed study of the Balkans, Mylonas shows that how a state treats a non-core group within its own borders is determined largely by whether the state's foreign policy is revisionist or cleaves to the international status quo, and whether it is allied or in rivalry with that group's external patrons. Mylonas injects international politics into the study of nation-building, building a bridge between international relations and the comparative politics of ethnicity and nationalism.
• The first book that systematically explores the effects of external involvement on nation-building policies toward non-core groups • Makes three innovative conceptual moves: from the misused term 'minority' to 'non-core group'; from focusing on 'homelands' as the external actor to the more inclusive concept 'external power'; and, from the dichotomous - and narrow - conceptualization of policies 'inclusion/exclusion' or 'violent/non-violent' to 'assimilation, accommodation, and exclusion' • Exhaustively documents nation-building policies in the post-WWI Balkans and uses both historical and political science methodologies to analyze them
Contents
1. Introduction; Part I. Theory: 2. The international politics of assimilation, accommodation, and exclusion; Part II. Empirical Evidence: 3. Why the Balkans?; 4. Cross-national variation: nation-building in post-World War I Balkans; 5. Odd cases: analysis of outliers; 6. Subnational variation: Greek nation-building in western Macedonia, 1916–1920; 7. Temporal variation: Serbian nation-building toward Albanians, 1878–1941; 8. Application of the theory beyond the Balkans; 9. Conclusion.
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