The Politics of Nation-Building
Making Co-Nationals, Refugees, and Minorities

Mylonas argues that foreign policy goals and international relations drives a state's assimilation or exclusion policies towards an ethnic group.

Harris Mylonas (Author)

9781107020450, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 18 February 2013

271 pages, 20 b/w illus. 11 maps 20 tables
24.1 x 15.9 x 1.9 cm, 0.52 kg

'The Politics of Nation-Building by Harris Mylonas distinguishes itself on several dimensions. It addresses an important question at the intersection of international and comparative politics by productively combining insights from theories of Comparative Politics and International Relations and by reformulating key concepts in the study of nation-building … Mylonas fashions creative hypotheses linking these elements and tests them on a body of rich empirical material; his analysis is sophisticated, subtle, and insightful.' The Katzenstein Prize committee

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.

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, 1916–20
7. Temporal variation: Serbian nation-building toward Albanians, 1878–1941
8. Application of the theory beyond the Balkans
9. Conclusion.

Subject Areas: International relations [JPS], Comparative politics [JPB]