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203 Annals Am. Acad. Pol. & Soc. Sci. xiii (1939)

handle is hein.cow/anamacp0203 and id is 1 raw text is: FOREWORD IN all ages man has been fired with the zeal for new scenes, new climes, new lands. He has rocked across deserts on camel-back, plowed through uncharted waves in crude galleys and beneath billowing sails, forded rivers, and spanned continents. Closely knit cultural groups retained their autonomy in differentiated areas of settlement, but many of their sons and son's sons moved on. They came into lands already occupied by other cultural groups. At times the newcomers blended with the old, at others they retained their own culture in the new land. As national states developed, boundary lines were drawn to include and to divide ethnic groups, but man's ceaseless movement left minority groups on both sides of any arbitrary and largely artificial line between states. Conquest and the redrawing of lines on the basis of the greater strength subjected formerly inde- pendent peoples to the status of minority groups and at the same time forced others to flee before the invader, creating new minority groups-refugee minorities-in other countries. Political persecution and religious intolerance have contributed still further to the ever increasing number of those whose cultural heritage reaches back to the country of its origin. Through the long range of history these three forces have operated together: man's eternal quest for new opportunities for himself and his children, conquest, and cultural conflict. Minority groups have existed within every state, but the minority problem is comparatively new. It is the recent development of nationalism that has created a problem of a historical fact. As political states have sought in the interest of self- preservation to enforce unanimity of culture upon all within their borders, conflict has been inevitable. The postwar years have witnessed the entrance and present dominance of a further intensifying element-the development of new ideologies, communism, fascism, nazism-and the identification of such ideologies with politi- cal states. Thus is added a new and even more irrational conflict factor which heightens both the degree of conformity of the in-group and the extent of hostility to the out-group. Race, language, religion, education, youth movements, and all the agencies of propaganda are made to serve this ideological concept of state. Out of this conflict arises the phenomenon of the refugee-the enforced emigrant. He may be literally forced to flee from persecution, or he may become a refugee be- cause he values his own cultural heritage more than he fears the insecurity attendant upon emigration. The turn of the present century gave new significance to the growing problem, and new terms expressed this increasing sense of conflict: national minorities, ethnocentrism, irrendentism, autocracy, and self-determination. The solu- tion to be found in the free economy of the past is no longer possible in the closed economy of the present. Thus the world enters upon the third stage: not only has the fact of minorities become the refugee problem, but the ready solution is no longer available at the very time that the problem itself has become most acute. It was this apparent paradox that intrigued the editor to accept the request of The American Academy of Political and Social Science to edit this number of THE ANNALS. He believed that a significant contribution would be made if the present problem could be analyzed in the light of its origins in the minority groups in every country and yet also with a frank appraisal of the new factors that have made the problem so complex and so baffling. Consequently this issue has been deliberately planned, despite the tense emo- xiii

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