In Europe itself, the rise of "national" awareness at the end of the eighteenth century spread across
Europe from West to East. By the middle of the century, some nationalist leaders and thinkers were already
thinking in terms of an exclusivist doctrine calling for the "nation" to correspond with the "state," that is, to
make political borders correspond with ethnic or linguistic borders. Since precise ethnic boundaries hardly
existed anywhere in Europe, any planning for such new "nations" necessitated thinking about what to do
with individuals from other ethnic groups who were left on the inside of someone else's national state.