cal ‘homeland’ of that people. Using the successor states to Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union as examples, Brubaker shows how dangerous this relationship can be to domestic and international security, since it creates a permanent and of- ten acute source of tension between neighboring states.
Brubaker’s minorities are actually double minorities, minorities both within the nationalizing states that rule them and in relation to the external homeland to which they ‘belong’ culturally, but they are a powerful force nonetheless. Be- cause their existence refutes the ethnic coherence of the host state, they attract welcome and unwelcome attention from their hosts, and because they represent an extension of the ethnicity of a neighboring state, they attract the attention of that state as well. As double minorities, their relationship both to the state that rules them and to their larger ethnie4 should be one of a periphery to two cen- ters, but they often seem able to call the shots on both sides.
In a few cases, however, the numerical balance between minority and external homeland is reversed. The minority community may actually be more numerous than the population of the external homeland. In other words, a community may be a minority in its country of residence without being a minority in its own eth- nie. The Mongolian Republic, dominated overwhelmingly by Mongols, has a population of about 2.4 million. Across the southern border in the Inner Mongo- lian Autonomous Region of China, however, live some 3.5 million Mongols.5 A similar situation applies in Laos. The ethnic Lao, numbering about 3.7 million, are politically dominant within Laos but they are much less numerous than the 19 million ethnic Lao of northeastern Thailand.6 And Malays are the dominant ethnic group in Malaysia, but across the Melaka Strait on the island of Sumatra lives a much larger community of Malays who are Indonesian citizens.7 These groups thus are not “double minorities” but rather “minority-majorities.”