conditioned by a sense of instrumentality. Those who planned the self-deter- mination of others sought to construct states which would carry out certain functions. These functions were most often described publicly as providing the necessary services to citizens and residents, services which depended on exist- ing institutions and infrastructure. As a result, most new states inherited their borders from their imperial past. The boundaries between former empires gen- erally remained inviolable and the fragmentation of empires commonly fol- lowed earlier internal administrative boundaries, even when those boundaries took no account of ethnic distribution.
In the early twenty-first century, when the notion of the constructed nature of ethnicity put forward by Barth and others has been in academic circulation for more than thirty years,1 it is easy to forget how widespread and firmly es- tablished was the belief that ethnic groups were primordial, even as recently as the 1970s. This belief in the objective reality of ethnic groups meant that any lack of fit between borders and ethnicity appeared to be an anomaly, although at- lases routinely presented maps showing how common such anomalies were. The drawing of international borders very often left small ethnic groups (and some large ones) without a state of their own, while many international borders failed to follow actual ethnic boundaries even between those peoples which did achieve their own states. The modern state’s need for geographical contiguity has almost everywhere seen ethnic enclaves included in larger, alien political units, and to this day, all around the globe, borders slice through the historical lands of ethnic groups, leaving pools of people as minorities on one or both sides of the frontier.2
In Nationalism Reframed, Brubaker analyses the tensions which this situa- tion creates.3 He describes the relationship between three parties: nationalizing states (states defined by the ethnicity of their dominant group), national mi- norities (self-conscious minority ethnic groups in those states), and external homelands (neighboring nations with a different dominant ethnic group which sees itself as protector and sponsor of ‘its’ communities in other states). The term “homeland” in this context does not mean that the national minority orig- inated from that region or that it was necessarily the ancestral homeland of the ethnic group as a whole. Rather, the ‘homeland’ here is the state which is dom- inated by that ethnic group, even if its territory fails to encompass the histori-