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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-
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