Why are National Minorities a Subject of European International Relations?

Abstract

Abstract This chapter explores why national minorities should be a subject of international relations when this field is primarily concerned with states and not groups or individuals within a state’s domestic jurisdiction. If statesmen and stateswomen demonstrated no concern for such groups in their foreign policies, then national minorities certainly would not be an appropriate subject for a book on international politics, though they would still be suitable for studies of domestic governance or constitutional law or political sociology, among others. However, such international indifference towards minorities does not exist: in practice, the foreign relations of many countries both today and in the past have been concerned with national minorities. This is because although the modern theory of state sovereignty postulates a neat fit between international boundaries and politically significant identities, in reality the two rarely coincide.