Western Powers' Diplomacy and the Proliferating Norm of Territorialized Ethnicity

This paper merges the insights of two disparate areas of scholarship:  work on norm transmission (Finnemore and Sikkink 1998, Checkel 1999, Acharya 2004) and historical studies illuminating how Western powers’ diplomacy sanctioned the consolidation of homogeneous nation-states (Ther 2014, Douglas 2012, Frank 2007).  There is also a growing amount of nuanced historical scholarship on the often complex and contingent circumstances in which particular nation-states emerged (Hillis 2013, Yosmaoglu 2014, Brown 2013, Blumi 2013), work that challenges the dominant conventional accounts focused on ethnonationalism.  Beyond remaining unexplored by scholars of norm transmission, this historical work offers a corrective to the work of sociologist Andreas Wimmer on the globalization of the nation-state, the predominant institution of territorialized ethnicity.  Wimmer focuses on nationalism and other factors, but gives insufficient attention to great power diplomacy along with local contingencies.  Centered on explaining the initial proliferation of the norm of territorialized ethnicity beyond Western Europe, this paper draws less attention to nationalism than to:  (1) major powers’ creation of a shifting incentive structure surrounding new state recognition, and (2) repeated international sanctioning of minority removal for conflict resolution.   Key cases include the great power intervention surrounding the creation of a nominally independent Greek state, the making of a Turkey with a Turkish Muslim demographic majority, the creation of new nation-states in the Balkans and East-Central Europe, and a consideration of the degree to which great powers and key policy-makers institutionalized territorialized ethnicity by the post-WWII era.