Before 1914 about 100 million people had unfulfilled national aspirations

Evidence

It has been estimated that prior to 1914 there were about 100 million people whose national aspirations had not been fulfilled. (See Charles Kingsley Webster, “Minorities: History,” in Encyclopedia Britannica, 1929.) The population of minorities was estimated approximately between 25 and 30 millions. (P. de Azcarate, “Minorities: League of Nations,” ibid.). The actual situation in Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia was much worse. In the former, the Czech “state people” constituted, with 7,200,000, about 50 per cent of the population, and in the latter 5,000,000 Serbs formed only 42 per cent of the total. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2493

Categorization

• XREF: Concrete baseline data for the nation-state exclusion dynamics this chapter builds toward — connects to imagined-community and national-minority readings later in the field.