Political Order and Political Decay by Francis Fukuyama

for minorities in neighboring countries. Thus the mixed Greek and Turkish populations in Asia Minor and the eastern Aegean who had lived side by side since the time of the Byzantine Empire sorted themselves out during the Greek-Turkish War of 1919–1922. World War II was triggered, in some sense, by stranded populations such as the Sudeten Germans in Czechoslovakia and the Baltic Germans in Poland. The end of the war in 1945 saw massive transfers of populations (as well as substantial redrawing of borders) among Germany, Poland, Ukraine, Czechoslovakia, and other countries. Ethnic cleansing in the Balkans was thus not an invention of the post–cold war period. As some observers pointed out at the time, the stability of modern Western Europe was built on ethnic cleansings that had taken place in earlier historical periods, which modern Europeans had conveniently forgotten.
    3. Cultural assimilation. Subordinate populations can adopt the language and customs of the dominant group, or in some cases intermarry to the point of eventually disappearing as a distinct minority. Assimilation can happen voluntarily, as minorities decide that it is in their self-interest to conform to the dominant culture. The reduction in the number of regional languages in France and the adoption of Parisian French as a national standard is an example. Similarly, most immigrant groups arriving in the United States learned English and took on American customs because that was a route to upward social mobility.
     Perhaps one of the greatest assimilation stories is China. Remarkably for so large a country, ethnic Han Chinese today constitute over 90 percent of the population. China was not always so homogeneous; its current ethnic makeup is the result of more than two millennia of relentless assimilation. The seat of ethnic Han civilization lay in the northerly Yellow River valley four millennia ago. The first Han state was established by the conquests of the state of Qin (in what is now north-central China) in the third century B.C. This state then expanded to the southeast, southwest, west, and northeast over the centuries. In doing so, the Han people ran into ethnically diverse indigenous populations, particularly among the Turkic-Mongolian nomads to the north and west. This original cultural diversity is preserved in the different forms of spoken Chinese that exist today. But the literary language was unified from the time of the original Qin Dynasty and served as the basis of a common elite culture for the entire empire. China was heavily influenced by non-Han ethnicities, but almost all of the foreign populations ultimately adopted Chinese cultural norms and intermarried so extensively with Han Chinese that those remaining in China were no longer distinguishable as ethnic minorities. The major exceptions are the Muslim Uighurs in the western province of Xinjiang, the Mongols in Inner Mongolia, and the Tibetans. Assimilation continues relentlessly as a matter of government policy, with the settling of ethnic Han Chinese in each of these areas.
     We should not underestimate the degree of power and often coercion that is required to bring about cultural assimilation. Choice of a national language is a political act on the part of those who speak it. Few minorities voluntarily give up their mother tongues, particularly if they themselves are concentrated in a particular region where they have lived for generations. The primary instrument of cultural assimilation is the public education system and secondarily the choice of language in public administration. Control over the school system is thus a hugely contested issue and the central objective of would-be nation builders.
    4. Adjusting posited national identities to fit political realities. All nation-building projects eventually run into practical obstacles to achieving correspondence between idea and reality, and it is often the idea that gives way first in