European State Formation and Regimes of Ethnicity: Explaining the Distribution of State Policies Toward Ethnic and Religious Diversity Across Europe

This paper presents the results of a 4-year long (2010-2014) global expert survey on state policies toward ethnic and religious diversity for all the European countries (defined as all the states that have a territory in the European continent). The project was funded by the European Commission through a Marie Curie Reintegration grant for the 2010-2014 period. Based on the observable patterns in the distribution of state policeis toward ethnic and religious diversity, European countries are classified as having monoethnic, multiethnic, and antiethnic regimes, as well as monoethnic-multiethnic and antiethnic-multiethnic hybrid regimes. Monoethnic regimes are based on policies that seek to limit nationality to one ethnic category only, while excluding others; antiethnic regimes are based on policies that seek to include but also assimilate an ethnically diverse citizenry; while multiethnic regimes are based on policies that seek to include and also foster the institutional and legal expression of ethnic diversity among their citizenry.  The geographical concentration of monoethnic regimes in the Nordic and Eastern rim of the European continent, as well as the geographical concentration of assimilationist antiethnic regimes in Western and Central Europe, as well as the relative scarcity of multiethnic regimes in the Europen continent, provides a curious tripartite puzzle. The author scrutinizes hypotheses based on colonial and contiguous imperial legacies, Communist legacies, religious legacies, economic development, and the age of statehood, among others, in seeking to explain this geographical pattern of distribution in state policies toward ethnic diversity observed across the European continent.